Manage Your Cyber Risk By Conducting a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment

Given how cyberattacks have evolved in the past few years, no organization has the luxury of forgoing cyber risk management.

As a cybersecurity leader, you must understand the likelihood of a security incident occurring and how it will impact your organization. This knowledge can also dictate your overall risk tolerance and risk appetite so you can strengthen your security posture.

In October 2021, we created the eSentire Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment tool so you can measure the maturity, resiliency, and strength of your organization’s cybersecurity efforts. This self-assessment tool is modeled off the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and incorporates four key Capability Groups (Identify, Detect, Protect, and Respond) so you can effectively manage and reduce cyber risk.

What is Cyber Risk Management?

The cyber risk management process is identifying risks, assessing them, and taking steps to reduce cyber risks. This includes evaluating the likelihood and possible impact of various types of attacks and designing strategies for responding quickly and effectively should an attack occur. Cyber risk management also involves educating users about potential threats and developing data security and privacy protection protocols.

Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the number of successful cyberattacks and limit their impact on individuals, organizations, and society. To maintains and strengthen your cybersecurity efforts, you should conduct annual cyber risk assessments.

What is a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment?

Many information security leaders are challenged with assessing their organization’s risk profile and communicating it to the internal and external stakeholders. You must be able to understand your organization's current cybersecurity maturity, identify any gaps, and address those issues. In fact, being able to measure and quantify cyber risk is often a key requirement for many regulatory frameworks.

Therefore, we recommend conducting a cybersecurity maturity assessment, sometimes called a cyber risk assessment, to help you identify the core capabilities of your existing cybersecurity program and determine whether the program has any vulnerabilities through a gap analysis. Once you conduct the cyber risk assessment, your team receives a detailed report so you can create a roadmap to prioritize cyber risk reduction.

Test your cybersecurity maturity with our free cybersecurity assessment tool

Get Your Report

What are the 5 Capability Maturity Levels?

Based on the Capability Maturity Model, the Capability Maturity Levels methodology is used by organizations to showcase how internal processes can be increasingly organized and become more mature.

In the context of a cybersecurity maturity assessment, you can use the Capability Maturity Levels to understand how your existing cybersecurity capabilities and security controls rank based on the 5 maturity levels: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimized.

• Initial (1-star): Processes are disorganized or even non-existent. Processes are mostly reactive to the environments and are not likely to be repeatable in nature.
• Repeatable(2-stars): Basic security principles are established and repeated processes, however, these processes have not been formally defined.
• Defined(3-stars): Security principles are formally defined and documented in procedures. Procedures are communicated to applicable parties and enforced.
• Managed (4-stars): Security metrics are established to monitor the effectiveness of the procedures.
• Optimized (5-stars): Procedures are continuously improved through continuous monitoring and automation.

Key Learnings from eSentire’s Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Tool

Within the first 8 months of introducing our Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment tool, over 440 organizations across a wide range of industries (e.g., Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail, etc.) have completed the assessment. Based on all the data aggregated, we have identified the top 5 strengths and top 5 weaknesses that organizations have within their cybersecurity programs.

Cybersecurity Capabilities: Top 5 Strengths

Our cyber risk assessment data shows that most organizations’ security programs are well-equipped to respond to cyber threats. Security teams have the processes, controls, and tools set in place to mitigate a cyberattack and incorporate key learnings from previous attempts. In addition, the data also shows that organizations somewhat prioritize threat detection and ensure key systems adhere to the policies and procedures.

Cybersecurity Capabilities: Top 5 Weaknesses

Our cyber maturity assessment data shows that most organizations’ security programs need to improve their threat detection capabilities, specifically how well they can detect anomalous behavior and whether they have 24/7 security monitoring. In addition, security teams are challenged with protecting their information assets, understanding and quantifying their organization’s cyber risks, and ensuring that all on-premises and cloud assets are configured properly to avoid compromise.

Recommendations to Reduce Cyber Risk

On a day-to-day basis, it’s likely that your in-house cybersecurity team is often focused on supporting the business and projects that drive revenue. It’s also likely that they don’t have the cybersecurity expertise or staffing coverage it takes to monitor cybersecurity threats 24/7. Therefore, we recommend adopting a cyber risk-based approach that includes:

• Adopting a comprehensive Vulnerability Management program that enables continuous awareness of the threat landscape, proactive vulnerability scanning to understand which systems are inadvertently exposed, and disciplined patch management.
• Deploying a robust security services solution capable of stopping both known and unknown cyberattacks, even those that leverage existing trusted applications for malicious purposes. eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU) develops original threat intelligence and research that continually enhances endpoint policy and protection across all of our customer environments through security network effects.
• Understanding the adversary’s techniques, tactics, and procedures as well as activities that constitute “normal behavior” for your internal applications to help differentiate whether or not a process is performing a legitimate, suspicious or malicious action. This information helps you understand the TTPs impacting your environment as we collaborate to harden your defenses.
• Ensuring you have complete visibility into your endpoint devices and all events to create contextual awareness regarding what’s actually happening on assets across your environment. eSentire MDR for Endpoint protects your assets 24/7 no matter where your users or data reside. We combine elite threat hunting with threat prevention and endpoint detection, response and remediation to eliminate blind spots, detect and stop ransomware, zero-day attacks, and supply chain attacks.
• Engaging an MDR service provider like eSentire that provides complete visibility and coverage of your attack surface with multi-signal MDR, powered by a strong XDR platform foundation and human expertise, to identify, contain, and respond to threats that bypass traditional security controls. Our 24/7 SOC Cyber Analysts enrich and correlate endpoint data with log and other data sources for deeper investigation.

Try the eSentire Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Tool

If you’re not certain how well-equipped your organization is to identify, detect, protect, and respond to threats, take our free cyber risk assessment. It’ll take 5-7 minutes to complete and you’ll get a customized detailed report with your strengths & weaknesses, valuable insights to inform your security strategy, and an action plan with recommendations to mitigate your cyber risk. As a complimentary follow-up, consider booking a meeting with our expert solution architects to review your results of your cyber risk assessment.

Try the Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment tool here.

Cybersecurity is everyone's business—including C-level executives, managers, administrative assistants, and even part-time office staff. Unfortunately, you can put all the right traditional cybersecurity measures in place, but all it takes is one employee clicking on a phishing email.

Understanding your organization's cybersecurity maturity, knowing the gaps, and addressing those issues is critical. After all, taking proactive steps to mitigate cybersecurity risk can mean the difference between a data breach or business as usual.

Learn how eSentire can help you build a more responsive security operation that aligns your business objectives with your unique risk exposure. Connect with an eSentire cybersecurity expert today.