With many organisations dealing with restricted budgets and a shortage of skilled individuals, they face the added challenge of assessing their current solutions and technologies to see if they are fit for purpose. In this next instalment of our CISO Insights blog, we will explore the importance of evaluating your tools to see if they work and creating a strategy to get the most out of your solutions.
Researching, deciding, and implementing a solution can be a time-consuming process, and factors can often be overlooked to speed this along. When considering investing in IT solutions, it is important to assess your specific needs and objectives to determine how the solution aligns with your business goals. Considering factors like scalability, compatibility with your existing infrastructure and long-term value are essential in the initial stages and Next Generation Security can act a trusted advisor to support this process.
Organisations may choose to buy their chosen solution off the shelf or through a third-party provider, such as a value-added reseller like NGS. Buying through a third-party provider gives you access to a wider, experienced team, as well as being introduced to disruptive, innovative technologies from vendors. For example, NGS recently launched a Managed Vulnerability and Patch Management service to support Qualys, who provide revolutionary architecture that powers their IT, security, and compliance cloud apps.
But just how much is the actual cost of not assessing your security solutions? With the average IT spend for organisations costing 8.2% of their revenue, there is an increased pressure to present strong ROI from the chosen solutions. Surprisingly, smaller organisations tend to overspend the most on IT, with an average of 6.9%, whilst large businesses are around the 3% mark. There are many factors that contribute to these statistics, such as time, resource, lack of staff training and poor visibility of a technology stack. Logging in and out of vendor portals, reviewing the technical solutions, and deciding on new technologies, takes plenty of time and expertise to ensure ultimate efficiency, which many smaller organisations can lack.
NGS’s security posture review provides a comprehensive assessment of an organisation’s security measures, policies, procedures, and technologies to evaluate its overall security posture. This service is delivered to help organisations of all sizes identify vulnerabilities, assess incident response readiness, and define compliance requirements, which in time, ensures business continuity. We have seen strong engagement with our customers who have opted for a security posture review, and this often leads to further services being delivered and technology vendor introductions.
Gytpol’s Validator tool is a notable example of this. Misconfigurations cause 80% of cyber-attacks, according to Microsoft, highlighting how essential visibility of your security is. Getting this visibility can be challenging, but what happens after the risks have been found? The remediation process of hardening even a single misconfiguration can become a complex project without the appropriate resources, which is where Gytpol’s remediation with zero impact technology comes in to play. With the click of a button, you can automatically remove the risks rapidly and ensure your devices are continuously hardened, which allows your team to focus on more challenging issues.
Some organisations can use solutions from more than twenty technology providers, which can be time-consuming to manage. We are seeing a growing focus towards vendor consolidation, to relieve the administration headache and create a more seamless process for all involved. Quite often, two solution’s capabilities can overlap, and security posture reviews can assess how to get the most value whilst reducing spend and complexity.
A popular method to decide which tools are effective, and which can be improved, replaced, or removed, is a Red Team engagement. Through attempting to breach some, or all an organisation’s IT systems, or locations. The aim of an engagement is to gain assurance that the people, solutions, and controls that have been deployed based on risk assessments are providing the level protection required.
Therefore, a well-scoped Red Team engagement can provide confidence that the products and security controls assessed have been configured in accordance with best practice, and that there are no common or known vulnerabilities in the tested components, at the time of test.
We have mentioned different solutions and technologies that provide visibility, assurance, and validation for your organisation, including our services delivered by our Technical and Consultancy teams. However, it is always beneficial to set time aside with an NGS Account Manager to discuss security requirements, technology solutions and the latest threats that can affect your organisation, whilst offering advice from an expert’s perspective. Drop us a message to start your journey with us.