Welcome to the complete guide to understanding your organization’s security posture and how it relates to security practice. This guide covers the hows and whys of security posture, such as how to perform a security posture assessment, ensure preventative measures are taken to protect your organization and explain why you should care.
First, let’s start by getting a good understanding of what “security posture” really means.
What is security posture?
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), security posture refers to the security status of an enterprise’s networks, information, and systems based on information security resources.
More clearly defined, security posture is all about your organization’s ability to identify, respond to, and recover from security threats and potential security risks. From the day-to-day security tasks to responding to enterprise-wide cyber threats, security posture gets to the heart of security at your organization.
Security posture considerations
The security posture of your organization considers its overall security level. This encompasses not only how executives, managers, and employees view and handle security measures, procedures, and issues but also the daily tasks meant to keep your organization secure.
1. Daily security practices
These daily tasks can be anything from scheduling external penetration tests and internal audits, to holding annual meetings for management to review the organization’s cybersecurity strategy, to reviewing security log data from your access management system. All of these tasks and more play an integral part in an organization’s security posture.
2. Technical security infrastructure
Security posture assessments can also be determined by the key security metrics underlying your organization’s systems and services. This differs from how your organization handles secure coding practices, security risks, updates, and the like; instead, the metrics focus on how the organization’s infrastructure was built and continues to be.
3. Third-party security posture
Security posture also considers the security risks of third parties and vendors that your organization chooses to partner with. Unfortunately, insecure third parties may create an additional attack surface for your organization’s sensitive systems, allowing bad actors access into your environment.
For this reason, your organization needs an overall security strategy that includes a vendor management program. The program should include written agreements by security professionals regarding data security, service uptime, and security incident response.
Why is it so important?
Each aspect discussed so far helps define your organization’s security posture. Next, we’ll explain why a security posture assessment is so important for organizations.
Help your organization understand its strengths and weaknesses
Knowing your organization’s security posture is important: it gives you a clear understanding of how ready and able your organization is to respond to security threats and prioritize security risks.
An assessment of your organization’s current security posture allows you to clearly define what your organization is doing well and where it can improve. Ultimately, it is in an organization’s best interest to have as secure a posture as possible.
Signals to stakeholders
Another reason security posture is so important is because it is reflected to your organization’s stakeholders. While many may think shareholders are the only security stakeholders, the group also includes employees and customers. Each of these stakeholders needs to understand your security controls so they can make critical decisions about working for, procuring, or investing in your organization.
Typically, key stakeholders such as customers and shareholders are interested in whether your organization completes basic risk mitigation actions. These actions improve an organization’s security posture, allowing investors and customers to have faith that your organization is ready to face all levels of cybersecurity threats, from viruses to data breaches. They don’t want to get caught up with an organization that has an insecure posture and could potentially expose their data and invade customer privacy.
The bottom line is this: if you don’t have a secure posture, you’re not going to attract as many customers. You may have the best product, customer service, and ratings, but in a world full of bad actors and hackers, if you’re not secure, then customers will look elsewhere.
Prevents data breaches and deters cyber attacks
It’s no secret that organizations with a secure posture are more likely to succeed. In fact, with the increasing frequency of major security incidents across all sectors, your security program matters now more than ever.
Threat actors are on the constant lookout for insecure organizations to target. Your organization is an easy target if you have an insecure security posture, which can lead to fines, reputational damage, and more. When such high stakes are on the line, the last thing you want to worry about is hackers stealing your organization’s sensitive information or, even worse, your customers’ information.
Security posture assessment: how to determine your organization’s security posture
Determining where you stand when it comes to security posture is very important. This will require you to take a look at your entire organization.
Questions you may ask are:
- What security controls are in place?
- Is our underlying code secure?
- Who oversees security on an executive and day-to-day basis?
- Is each team abiding by your security programs?
And more. Answering these questions will help determine where you stand.
Below are some areas to consider when evaluating and determining your cybersecurity posture:
1) Industry- and geographic-specific security requirements
Several industries are required by law to abide by specific security requirements. For example, healthcare companies in the US must abide by HIPPA, which stipulates specific requirements regarding patient data.
It’s in your best interest to ensure that your company’s security posture complies with all industry security requirements.
Additionally, various countries and geographic areas around the world require adherence to a specific set of security requirements, especially when your organization handles customer data in any amount and any way. An example of this would be the EU and GDPR, which are laws that protect the privacy and security of personal data of those located in the EEA.
As such, it would be prudent to determine if the specific country or geographic location(s) in which your organization operates is subject to any security requirements.
2) Security certification determination
Some security certifications are more general, and organizations can benefit from having them. As the certifications are issued by a third party and evaluated by a standard set of security controls, they allow stakeholders to confidently see your organization as secure.
Some examples of these certifications are ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and more.
3) Internal and external security documentation
Other documents that can help you determine your security posture include the privacy policy, standard Terms of Service agreements, and customer contracts.
These externally facing documents typically outline the security practices of your organization, how data is handled, and what rights customers have in relation to doing business with your organization.
Another place to look is in your organization’s internal security documentation, such as an ISMS (Information Security Management System). This will include organization-specific security strategies and procedures, including security architecture, password policies, internal logging and monitoring, security training, account management, vulnerability management, change management, and so on.
Security Practices vs Security Posture
While closely related, security posture and security practices are not the same. Security practices encompass the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks employees perform to keep your organization secure
These tasks include continuous monitoring of audit logs, updating third-party applications, reviewing IDP/IDS policies, educating employees about security education, completing internal audits, scheduling external penetration tests, working with auditors on security certifications, meeting with top executives to update internal security policies, and maintaining industry certifications.
Although most security practices are handled by the IT and Security teams, every employee is responsible for the organization’s security. Your organization is most secure when each employee understands and takes security risks seriously.
What does a strong security posture look like?
A strong security posture looks like your organization is completing all the large and small security practices it takes to make your organization secure. Of course, strengthening your security posture takes time and effort. However, maintaining a strong security posture not only bolsters your organizations reputation, but also deters bad actors.
Steps to Strengthen Security Posture
1) Evaluate your current security posture
To strengthen your security posture, you must first know where you are posture-wise. Look at your overall security. What security practices are you currently doing well? Where can you improve? What security certifications, documentation, and requirements do you have? Which do you need?
A crucial part of a security posture assessment is evaluating your people. How many employees in your organization directly contribute to security tasks? Are they over- or under-worked? What about your other employees? Do they take security seriously? Do they need additional training and accountability? All of these questions are necessary for determining your current security posture.
2) Determine the security controls to be implemented
Although ideal, implementing all security best practices right away is not realistic. Therefore, the second part of strengthening your security posture is determining from your evaluation what to implement and when.
Each organization is different, so determine what will provide the best ROI for your organization and do that first. For example, do you need to meet a country-specific security requirement? If so, tackle that task before you move on to other, and possibly less urgent, security tasks.
3) Make an action plan
After determining what your organization needs to implement, you need to create an action plan. Your action plan needs to include, at a minimum, roles and responsibilities, specific tasks, and due dates.
Determining not only what you need to do, but who in your organization is going to do it is of paramount importance. Creating a timeline can help those individuals with assigned tasks complete them in a timely manner. Executing your action plan is much easier when it’s detailed and specific.
4) Execute and evaluate the plan
As individuals in your organization work on the specific tasks they’ve been assigned, you can start to see your security controls improve. Consistent evaluation over time should be part and parcel of your execution.
Evaluations can include timeliness, quality, and next steps. For example, are employees able to complete the tasks on time? Do timelines need to be adjusted? Were tasks assigned to the right employees? Did they report on their progress? Yet one of the most important questions to ask yourself in the execution and evaluation phase is: are the security practices implemented actually helping our organization have a more secure posture?
Once you know the answer to this question, you can decide what tasks strengthened your security posture the most. And the final step of this process? Rinse and repeat. Go back to your original security posture assessment. What security practices can be implemented next? What is the ROI for these? How can you best implement these practices? And the cycle continues.
What is cloud security posture management?
Cloud services are nothing new to organizations, but the security surrounding cloud services can affect an organization’s security posture. Cloud security frameworks are extremely important and-similar to other parts of your security program-can either attract or repel attackers.
Depending how an organization uses cloud services can determine the organization’s approach to cloud security posture management. Some things to keep in mind with cloud security are:
- Where information is hosted?
- How secure is the host?
- Is any data publicly accessible?
- Can your organization be affected by data breaches of the cloud services?
And more. These questions will help you determine what security practices you need to implement in order to keep your organization in a secure position. Just as you did before, evaluate, plan, and execute on the security items of the most value to your security posture. This will ensure your cloud security posture is as strong as it can be and as quick as possible.
Overall security posture and practices
By implementing all of the secure best practices as defined by the industry (such as CISA and NIST) and following any industry-specific security requirements, your organization is well on its way to improving and keeping a highly secure posture.
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