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Building a Cyber Security Program
Transforming a Cybersecurity Program: Top 5 Best Practices
The utilization of effective cyber defense tools and techniques – including best practices for building a cybersecurity program – were recently covered in an episode of Cybersecurity America with our own Deeps, Josh Nicholson and Michael Kennemer, Industrial Control Systems & Platform Security Engineer at DeepSeas. Below are top five best practices to consider when transforming your cybersecurity program and capabilities.
1. Prioritize Your Cybersecurity Program Transformation
It’s important to align your threat detection and response, analytics, and visibility to your prioritized assets for the business. To do this, get a better understanding of your organization’s human assets, the identities associated with them, and the assets they use so you can prioritize your detection and response needs. Look at the detection and response life cycle as a whole. Otherwise, you may be generating a ton of noise and wasting a lot of time and resources chasing things that have very little value or are of little concern to the business.
2. Build and Maintain Quality Teams
Growing, hiring, training, and augmenting your staff to match your organization’s objectives are critical when building a cybersecurity program. Technology doesn’t run itself. It’s a living creature and requires maintenance by expert and trusted team members. Building and maintaining a team of staff appropriate to the needs of your business is imperative.
3. Optimize Your Processes
Tied tightly to building and maintaining your team is optimizing your processes. It’s important that you right-size the tools and techniques your team has access to with the right kind of technology. Optimized workflows help your team do their jobs better and avoid burnout by limiting manual, repetitive actions.
4. Validate Your Capabilities
Test, test, test. Select and collect the right data, make sure that you have the right analytics, and validate it. You might do this through purple teaming or breach attack simulation tools. These practices are critical to continually validate what your capabilities are and to push your capabilities forward.
5. Measure While You’re Building a Cybersecurity Program
You can’t manage what you aren’t measuring. Metrics may not be what everyone gets excited about in cybersecurity, but they are essential to continually adapt and improve your program. How efficient is your team? What is your mean time to containment? What is your mean time to detection? If you aren’t gleaning insights from metrics, you can’t make real efforts toward improvements.
Tune into the Cybersecurity America podcast to continue learning more from Josh and Michael about best practices developing, maturing, and scaling your cyber defense program.
