What are Cyber Security Measures of Effectiveness?
27.04.2020
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Simply employing top cyber security solutions is not enough for today’s business environment. In order to make sure that your organization is safe, you will also need to measure the effectiveness of cyber security measures you have taken. Read our article to learn more.
As the digital revolution makes adopt more and more advanced technological solutions each day, our businesses become heavily dependent on internet, online communication and other digital tools. As a result, we expose much more greater amounts of data, and our organizations become a hot target for all kinds of cyber criminals, hackers and intruders. That is why taking necessary measures and enhancing the security posture of our organizations has never been more essential. In order to protect our data and valuable online assets, we do everything in our power: we buy expensive and high quality software, we implement complex cyber security solutions, we even get support from MSSPs and similar service providers. But all these measures enough? Are they really protecting our organizations? Are they efficient enough?
Knowing the efficiency of our security measures is as important as taking those measures. That is why measuring cyber security effectiveness is one of the crucial practices within the realm of cyber security. In this article, we will take a closer look at what cyber security effectiveness is and how you can measure it.
Simply put, cyber security effectiveness refers to the efficiency, strengths and weaknesses of any measures you have taken in order to protect the information and digitalized assets of your organization.
Let’s go with an analogy and think of your organization as a house. In this house, you store sensitive data like the personal information of your customers, the sales reports of your organization and such. Also, you have important assets there as well: servers, expensive devices, networks and more. In order to protect your house from intruders that aim to steal your assets and/or information, you build a wall all around your garden, install CCTV cameras and hire security staff. This might seem enough, but if there are cracks and holes in your walls, your CCTV cameras don’t work properly, or if your security staff is slacking off, all these measures are of no use. Or maybe, your CCTV cameras display the front door which is heavily guarded by your security staff, as a result you are missing out on who enters through the back door. With the help of cyber security effectiveness measures, you can see if you are making use of your security measures in the most efficient way possible and if those measures actually do what they are supposed to do.
There are two different approaches when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your cyber security solutions: Dashboards and benchmarking. Below you can find the details of these two.
Dashboards: You can create dashboards where you can view and assess the meaningful metrics that are quantified in terms of cost, risk level and time.
Benchmarking: This approach includes getting data from similar organizations to create a benchmark and compare your organization’s cyber security measures with the help of this benchmark.
