What is a Strategy Execution Platform for Security?

As we discussed previously, your security program is not the same as a security strategy. Rather than having a disparate set of tools, documents, and initiatives, what businesses need is a unified and coherent strategy driving all of their cybersecurity efforts.

And to have any hope of this happening, every organization needs a strategy execution platform for security.

In this post, we’ll dive into exactly what a strategy execution platform for security is from a practical perspective.

Aligning the Cybersecurity Program with Business Priorities

First and foremost, a security strategy must support business priorities. Attempting to design or implement one in a vacuum, without buy-in from those responsible for earning revenue, is a recipe for disaster.

Leveraging a  strategy execution platform for security as part of your program design can help you to avoid this key pitfall. Along the way, you’ll need to accomplish several key tasks, with which a  strategy execution platform for security can help.

Identifying Your Risk Appetite

Since risk is an unavoidable aspect of running a modern business, leaders should focus on identifying their organization’s cyber risk appetite. This essentially means the level of cybersecurity risk that the business is willing to sustain under normal conditions.

Factors that should help to drive risk appetite are:

• Value delivered by the business. Does the business provide services related to healthcare, Transportation, Media and Entertainment? Each sector has its own nuances, so different verticals can reasonably drive different risk appetites.
• Revenue and growth rate. More risk might be justified if there is a greater opportunity to be had that can accelerate company growth and revenue.
• Regulatory and statutory requirements. Some organizations might be legally prohibited from assuming certain types of risks that might be suitable for others.

Aside from legal and ethical considerations, there is no clear correct answer to the question “what should our risk appetite be?” The only wrong answers would be ignoring the risk potential or by taking on a level of risk that exceeds the expected value of the business existing. Otherwise, focused deliberation and discussion will be the only way to arrive at a reasonable answer.

Weighing Cyber Risks and Business Rewards

A  strategy execution platform for security can help to identify value drivers of the business, its crown jewel assets, regulatory risks, and threats to data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Comparing all of these things in a structured manner can help you to make sound decisions. And leveraging a strategy execution platform as part of the process can foster collaboration between business, IT, and Security leaders.

Once an organization has a clearly-established risk appetite it becomes much easier to make decisions and determine appropriate tradeoffs. Documenting the results of such an exercise in a strategy execution platform for security and revisiting it regularly provides a “north star” to the business when it comes time to put the strategy into action.

Translating the Security Strategy into Action

The practical implementation of an organization’s security strategy is its cybersecurity program. Tactics such as developing policies, deploying tools, and training your team on best practices are all important. But you should ensure that all of these actions help to drive your underlying strategy forward.

A strategy execution platform for security serves as the nerve center of your security program throughout your company’s journey. Among the things it can help you do include:

Prioritizing Cybersecurity Initiatives

Every business faces resource constraints.

Thus, understanding what information, systems, processes are critical for your business to operate is the first step. Once you understand what it is you’re protecting, you can plan and prioritize the actions with the highest return on investment at any given moment. With a documented risk appetite in place and an understanding of the resources available, it becomes much easier to understand which items are “must haves” and which ones are “nice-to-haves.”

Using your knowledge of the threats facing your business as well its regulatory constraints, you can make informed decisions on whether to:

• Deploy a mobile device management (MDM) tool or spend more on training your employees to deal with common cyber threats.
• Purchase more cyber insurance coverage or explore deploying a more advanced endpoint protection platform (EPP).
• Increase the patching and maintenance cadence for a given software product line or deprecate it entirely.

A purpose-built strategy execution platform for security will help you “rack-and-stack” the wide variety of projects your company could undertake, allowing you to choose the projects that best fit your needs and resources.

Developing a Cybersecurity Roadmap

Once you have decided where to allocate resources, you will need a way to track progress towards your goals. With the complexity inherent to most businesses, simple spreadsheet-based processes and procedures are unlikely to cut it.

What you will need is a way to map your priorities to timelines and to task owners and milestones. Only through disciplined execution will you be able to achieve your objectives on time and budget. A cybersecurity strategy execution platform can help you to plan these effectively and in a single easily accessible location.

Establishing Metrics to Measure Progress

What gets measured gets managed.

Cybersecurity is no different than any other business discipline. Ensuring you have access to the right metrics, reports, and dashboards is critical. A well-designed strategy execution platform for security will put information at your fingertips, such as answers to the questions:

• Am I covering all my assets?
• Am I remediating my security backlog fast enough?
• Am I creating more or less attack surface?
• Am I reducing the time to live of threats and vulnerabilities? 
• Am I getting a good return on my security investments?

By providing answers to these questions quickly and accurately, a strategy execution platform ensures that you are on track through analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs).

Orchestrating Cybersecurity Tool Use

As part of your strategy execution plan, you will need to leverage a variety of tools and potentially even some service providers to help enhance your security program. Ensuring these decisions remain aligned with your overall strategy can be challenging as you begin to use more and more advanced systems.

Some key outcomes where a strategy execution platform for security can help include:

Evaluate Cybersecurity Tools and Technologies

Procuring new cybersecurity products and services can be challenging, especially for organizations lacking experienced security professionals or leadership. Due to the opacity and technical complexity of the space, organizations oftentimes find it difficult to even understand the capabilities of offerings on the market and where they fit into the business’ existing stack.

This is another place where a strategy execution platform can help. Curating the process of selecting any of the following solutions can save significant amounts of time and wasted effort on unnecessary or failed deployment efforts for:

• Managed Security Service Providers
• Identity and Access Management
• Security Awareness Training Programs
• Incident Response and Digital Forensics
• Email Security and Phishing Prevention

Integrating Tools into the Security Stack

In addition to helping you prioritize and select security solutions, a well-designed strategy execution platform for security will ensure you effectively integrate new tools into your existing environment. Due to the complexity and volume of data such tools provide, staying on top of alerts and notifications from even a handful of solutions can prove overwhelming.

That’s why having a platform with simple integrations into your entire security technology stack is a key requirement for any business implementing their security strategy. Important features include the ability to:

• Map technical controls to compliance frameworks and the business’ risk register.
• Gather telemetry from tools on a continuous basis and in a way to update existing dashboards and reporting systems.
• Collect evidence for presentation during audits in an easily accessible manner.

Simply having top-of-the-line tools without any coherent plan for using them to manage your organizational risk is going to be both expensive and ineffective. A leading strategy execution platform can remove friction and drive synergy between all of the systems working to keep your assets safe.

Conclusion

As we discussed before, a security program is more than merely a collection of tactics such as scanning tools, policies, and procedures. Furthermore, a well-designed security program for one company might be completely inappropriate for another, depending on its business goals, threats, and risk appetite.

Thus, a centralized tool for orchestrating your security program is a key requirement for any business operating in the digital world. A Cybersecurity Strategy Execution Platform is what you will need to deliver this capability.

If you are ready to start translating your security strategy into an effective cybersecurity program, contact us to start using the Enveedo platform today!