Security Posture Management

Security Posture Management is a market segment of IT security tools that covers your overall defense against cyber threats. This includes everything from security policies, employee training, and any security software, including anti-malware, firewall, and anti-virus. Security posture management takes into account the collective security status of all software and hardware, to give an overall picture of an organization’s cyber resiliency. 

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Why is Your Company’s Security Posture Critical?

Understanding your organization’s security posture helps you get a clear picture of how secure your business is when facing cyber threats from internal and external sources.  Through such an assessment, you can build out an appropriate plan to protect your enterprise from cyber incidents and data breaches. 

Security teams should regularly monitor and maintain the proper security posture of their business. Beyond focusing just on technologies, it is recommended to adopt a holistic approach that takes into consideration all training programs, policies, systems, employee education programs, and workplace culture. Having a proactive approach to building a security conscious culture is an oft neglected part of a strong security posture. 

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How Can a Company Strengthen its Security Posture?

There are four policies that companies should adopt to ensure their security posture stays strong: 

●  Give one team the responsibility for security posture maintenance: A separate security team can monitor the posture regularly. This team would be responsible for ensuring that policies are being followed and raise flags when they notice both technical and cultural weaknesses in the security posture. 

●  Periodic review: What got you there won’t get you to where you're going. The security posture that made sense 24 months ago might have been designed to face threats that are no longer relevant.  

●  Encourage a strong security culture: Cybersecurity awareness training is always something difficult to get right. Despite the challenges, employees should understand the importance of company policies and of mitigating the risks of data breaches. 

●  Plan for cyberattacks: Prepositioning an organization for data breaches and cyber incidents is critical. Not every data breach needs to be a major incident. If the company’s data and other critical assets are secured with the right level of protection, an infrastructure breach won’t be catastrophic. The same applies to incident response processes and other aspects of your security posture. 

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