What is a Security Maturity Assessment?

Taking proactive steps to mitigate cybersecurity risk can mean the difference between a data breach or business as usual. A good starting point is to understand your organization's cybersecurity maturity and know where there may be gaps so you can begin to address your risk.

A Security Maturity Assessment is like a health checkup for your cybersecurity program; it evaluates how well your organization can prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity threats and measures your organization’s maturity against industry standards. It provides a clear picture of your cybersecurity strengths, uncovers gaps, and helps you create a roadmap to build a stronger defense. It is also often a critical step in how organizations evaluate how they meet regulatory compliance requirements.

In this article, we dive deeper into cybersecurity maturity assessments so you understand their purpose, benefits, included components, steps & models, and how they can help your business develop an effective cybersecurity strategy.

What is the Purpose of Security Maturity Assessment?

A Security Maturity Assessment examines the effectiveness of your organization's cybersecurity tools, processes, and people. It gauges your current security posture, your capacity to prevent, detect, investigate and respond to cybersecurity incidents, and minimize your cyber risk.

Its purpose is to align your security program with your business goals, enabling you to:

• Identify gaps in your defenses.
• Build a strategy to reduce your organization’s risk exposure.
• Create a roadmap to improve cyber resilience and safeguard critical assets.

What are the Benefits of Security Maturity Assessment?

A Security Maturity Assessment helps your business identify cybersecurity defense gaps and areas for improvement. Core benefits of conducting a Security Maturity Assessment include:

• Identify Gaps: Pinpoint areas where your current cybersecurity measures fall short.
• Strategic Planning: Develop a prioritized roadmap for improvement based on your unique risk profile.
• Compliance Alignment: Ensure your cybersecurity program meets industry regulations and standards.
• Risk Mitigation: Proactively protect your organization, reputation, and bottom line from cyberattacks.

While cybersecurity maturity assessments are complex, they provide a 360-degree view of the security posture that ultimately helps you enhance and maintain a robust cybersecurity strategy.

What Components are included in a Security Maturity Assessment?

A cybersecurity maturity assessment is not limited to just tools and technology; it should also consider the human elements and the processes that tie everything together. Therefore, your assessment should evaluate your security tools, how they’re used, and the humans who interact with them.

People

While your employees play a critical role in cybersecurity, they’re often the weakest link as well. Therefore, your cybersecurity maturity assessment should evaluate:

• Your employees’ recognition, and awareness, of real-world phishing attempts and how to report potential security incidents
• Your employees’ understanding of the importance of strong password policies
• The structure, expertise, and responsibilities of your cybersecurity team to ensure a robust, effective security program

Processes

Well-defined processes are crucial to ensure the technology is used effectively, and that your organization's day-to-day operations are secure. Therefore, your security maturity assessment should examine:

• Existing security policies and procedures, such as patch management, backup protocols, access controls, and incident management processes
• Achieving, and maintaining, cybersecurity compliance with the applicable regulatory standards and frameworks (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS)

Technology

The technology you employ is a crucial part of your cybersecurity infrastructure. Therefore, the assessment should evaluate:

• Existing security hardware and software, such as firewalls, antivirus programs, and intrusion detection systems, as well as network infrastructure and data protection measures
• How effectively the tools are used, configured, and updated to protect against evolving threats

By combining these components, a security maturity assessment provides a full 360-degree view of your organization's ability to manage cyber risks to help you build your cybersecurity roadmap.

What are the Steps of Security Maturity Assessments?

A security maturity assessment can be broken into four manageable steps:

Initial Review

A security maturity assessment begins with a thorough review of your current cybersecurity controls. This involves identifying all the components – people, procedures and technology- and their current effectiveness in defending against cyber threats. This step will give you an understanding of where your security posture stands today.

Gap Analysis

The next step is a comprehensive gap analysis that highlights areas needing improvement. In this stage, you want to uncover weak points in your security protocols, often comparing your procedures and tools against a recognized industry standard or framework, like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

The goal is to identify where your cybersecurity measures do not meet these industry standards and then plan how to address your gaps.

Roadmap Development

Post your gap analysis, the development of a roadmap for cybersecurity maturity improvement. The roadmap should detail strategies and actions for filling identified gaps.

It’s critical to include short- and long-term goals. Short term goals often include immediate fixes for critical vulnerabilities, while long-term goals might involve comprehensive policy changes, training programs for personnel, and/or infrastructure changes.

Implementation and Ongoing Review

Once the plan is crafted, implementation begins. Remember, achieving cybersecurity maturity isn't a one-time task but an ongoing process. Regular reassessments should be performed to adjust your controls for any changes in the threat landscape, business environment, or internal changes in your business.

Types of Security Maturity Models

There are different industry standards and frameworks that can help guide your security maturity assessment, each with unique attributes which can be helpful for different types of business. Some well-regarded examples include the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), NIST Cybersecurity Framework and ISO 27001.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process and behavioral model that helps organizations streamline process improvement and encourage productive, efficient behaviors that decrease risks in software, product, and service development.

NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a set of voluntary guidelines that help your business assess and improve their ability to prevent, detect, investigate and respond to cybersecurity risks. This framework is built around five core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. Each function is vital to understanding how a business’ cybersecurity program aligns with its expected risk management objectives.

ISO 27001 is an international standard to manage information security. It provides guidance for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system. Its core focus is to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data within an organization. Achieving ISO 27001 certification can provide third-party validation that your business is following information security best practices.

Choosing the best model for your business depends on your organizational objectives, industry, size, and specific risk factors. A deep understanding of these models helps to develop a security maturity assessment tailored to your business's needs and goals.

CYBERSECURITY MATURITY ASSESSMENT

Test Your Cybersecurity Maturity

Complete this free interactive cybersecurity assessment tool based on industry frameworks including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to identify security concerns within your environment. The assessment will take 5-7 minutes to complete.

TAKE THE ASSESSMENT

How Do Security Maturity Assessments Fit into Virtual CISO (vCISO) Services?

A vCISO service provides an organization with access to a cybersecurity expert or a team of experts allowing businesses to get the benefit of a highly skilled CISO without needing to employ a full-time executive.

A security maturity assessment is typically the starting point of a vCISO advisory service. It ensures that your vCISO understands your strengths, weaknesses, and the greatest areas of cyber risk so they can help you build your cybersecurity roadmap that aligns your cybersecurity strategy and business objectives.

How eSentire vCISO Services Can Help

eSentire's vCISO services assess your cybersecurity program maturity against your industry peers and measure your ability to address the latest cyber threats. Our vCISO services aim to help you harmonize your cybersecurity strategy with your business objectives, building cyber roadmap that minimize your cyber risk.

As part of every engagement, our Virtual CISO (vCISO) team conducts an organization-wide cybersecurity maturity assessment based on the NIST framework. This ensures our vCISO experts understand your organization's specific strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.

eSentire vCISO services benefit your business by:

• Aligning to your business objectives, risk and cybersecurity strategy
• Promoting organization-wide buy-in with effective resource allocation
• Demonstrating measurable success to your executive management and board
• Defining action plans for a new cybersecurity program or updating your existing cybersecurity program
• Examining your organization’s unique environment, architecture, operations, culture and cyber threat landscape against industry frameworks
• Identifying and prioritizing your cybersecurity architecture risk, subsequent control and remediation opportunities
• Meeting and exceeding your compliance mandates

Contact us to learn more about how eSentire can help you build a more resilient cybersecurity operation today.