A cyber security strategy is fundamental in helping your company take a proactive approach to security instead of reacting to every new threat, which can be time consuming and expensive.

As organizations increasingly link more and more of their operational processes to their cyber infrastructure, effective cyber security is key to an organization’s ability to protect its assets, including its reputation, intellectual property (IP), staff and customers. To counter the evolving cyber threat facing organizations today, business leaders must ensure they have an integrated approach to cyber security tailored to their particular business and risk profile, addressing not only the technical aspects of their defense, but also the people and organizational elements.

1.Determine what you have to protect

Gain an understanding of the assets your company has to protect. Start with reviewing your business processes and understanding how revenue is generated by the company as well as what systems would have the ability to disrupt that by being unavailable or having their data stolen. You should also identify the data and other IT assets such as applications, devices, servers, and users that are critical to your business.

2. Identify what you’re legally required to protect

While compliance and security aren’t the same thing, most organizations put the responsibility of maintaining compliance or security compliance frameworks on the CISO. Incompliance is costly and damaging to your business. Ensuring you design your strategic cyber security plan with required compliance frameworks in mind while help ensure your plan prioritizes legal requirements.

3. Understand your company’s risk appetite

The cyber security threat has become more complex, and organizations must first understand what it means for them, the level of acceptable risk and key areas for investment in cyber security. Before you begin developing a cyber security strategy, understand your organization’s risk appetite, or the total risk your organization is prepared to accept in pursuit of its strategic objectives. Risk appetites differ depending on your company’s financial strength, industry, objectives being pursued, and more. By understanding your company’s risk appetite, you can ensure you’re not over- or under-protecting your business.

4. Understand the threat landscape

Once you know what you need to protect, you need to analyze the threat landscape. To do that, you’ll need to first understand the environment in which your company operates. Who are your customers? What are you selling? Who would benefit from disrupting your business? You’ll also want to look at what is happening with your competitors. What threats do they face? Has their security been breached in the past? The threats your competitors are facing are almost always the same threats that may impact your business.

Also, understand the types of threats that your business needs to protect itself against. What types of resources do potential attackers have? What are their motivations for shutting you down? Knowing these answers will give you the upper hand in defending your business against these threats.

5. Pick a framework, identify the current state of your security environment, and establish a timeline.

To build your plan, you need to pick a framework to use. Options include ISO 27001 , CIS Controls, and NIST. It’s important to choose a framework so you can effectively track progress while prioritizing the most important steps. When you know what needs to be protected from a processes and risk management point of view, evaluate the effectiveness of your current security measures. Are you protecting the right assets? Do you currently have the right processes in place for compliance?

You’ll also need to decide on a timeline, which will depend on the current state of your security. Things will change over time, requiring occasional updates to the timeline. However, it’s important to have a target timeline in mind to get to what your organization considers an acceptable level of risk. With a two- or three-year plan, you’ll need to spend the first year focused on IT hygiene while addressing the greatest or most-likely-to-be-exploited risks.

6. Evaluate your company’s security maturity level.

The concept of security maturity refers to a company’s adherence to security best practices and processes; measuring it helps you identify gaps and areas for improvement. Whether you do this analysis yourself or hire a consultant, make sure the process is repeatable. That way, when you check your security maturity in the future, you’ll have a benchmark with which to compare the results.

7. Evaluate your technology stack.

Then, look at the technology you currently have in place and identify tools you aren’t currently using to their full benefit. Underutilized software or other tools are only costing you money, time, and increasing your attack surface. Find out if the solutions you’ve identified here are fulfilling their original purposes, and if there is any way to get better use of them. If not, consider getting rid of it.

You can also use the Cyber Defense Matrix to identify any gaps you may have in security. There are a lot of cyber security solutions on the market, and making sure that all aspects of your company are protected can be challenging. The Cyber Defense Matrix helps you understand what you need so when you start looking at security solutions, you can quickly understand which products solve what problems.

8. Evaluate your organization’s ability to execute the plan.

The final step in the process of developing a cybersecurity strategy is assessing your organization’s ability to get the necessary security work done. You’ll need to take a look at your current IT and security teams to understand their skill sets and bandwidth. If you don’t have the resources you need, you may need to plan to hire additional team members or outsource some of your security work in order to execute your strategic cyber security plan.

During this step, it’s also important to think about what the future holds for your business or the IT team.

• Will your IT team be handling any large scale, company-wide projects in the foreseeable future?
• Does your company have any big product launches coming up, or a possible merger or acquisition on the horizon?
• Is your IT team working on a major workstation upgrade program for next year? This could be the perfect time to harden them, as applications will need to be tested for compatibility with the new operating system anyway!

Strategy: Follow a Risk-based Approach

As a trusted Cybersecurity advisor, our expert and experienced consultants can support you with the development of comprehensive cybersecurity strategies that are effective, manageable and offer maximum return on cybersecurity investments while addressing emerging threats/risks specific to an organization’s business operations. Our consulting services utilize best practices and a standardized methodology helping speed deployment of edge-to-edge security solutions in an evolving threat landscape.

With a defined Cyber Security Strategy, organizations can more effectively plan how to address both current, and future threats to their organization, taking into account complex legislation, regulation and the Cyber risks specific to your business.

Roadmap: Define where your Cybersecurity programs need to go

A 3-year Cybersecurity roadmap considers where an organization needs to go in terms of implementing cybersecurity programs, while being closely aligned with business objectives. The roadmap includes an organization’s existing cybersecurity programs, as well as where those programs need to advance, but has the foresight and agility to include tools and technologies that may have not yet been discovered or invented.

Our cyber experts have an in-depth understanding of the threat landscape and take a risk-based approach to identifying how it impacts individual organizations. Cybercomply will take into consideration the needs of the business, objectives, and risk strategy when developing the cybersecurity roadmap that will be used to drive an organization’s cybersecurity program and initiatives into the future.

To learn more about how Cybercomply can support your cyber security strategy, kindly contact us today.