Cybersecurity Continuous Assurance

Cybersecurity continuous assurance is the process of being able to tell at any time how well our security ecosystem is working. So, how important is a continuous assurance when it comes to reporting and management? As we now know, there are more and more new threats, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with them all and make sure the systems are working well.

Hacker groups find the holes in our systems, and exploits that take advantage of these holes are being made more and more quickly. These are showing up on the dark web and are available for any hacker to use as they see fit. It’s no longer helpful to test every year or every two years. This needs to be done all the time to make sure that we know about any new threats and have the right patches in place to deal with them if they happen.

The governance programme needs to make sure that the organisation is always safe, and the executives need to know that they can work in a safe place. The manager of security risks must be able to give this guarantee. And in order to do that, they need to know that the whole system has been tested. Lastly, we must be able to stop attacks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The people outside the organisation who are trying to attack it won’t wait for us to be there to watch them.

So, who is in charge of and owns the cybersecurity continuous assurance programme? The governance team has to keep an eye on the assurance programme. They need to make sure it is always done and that all parts of the security ecosystem are tested. But the owners of the application and system must be fully involved as well. These are the people whose job it is to make sure their systems are safe. And they will give the budgets, or should give the budgets, to make sure they are kept up to date.

The security risk manager must also be involved to make sure that the controls assurance is working and that the risks that have been identified are being managed. And finally, why might a certain plan not work? Security strategies are made up of a number of goals that need to be met over a longer period of time. These are improved by short- to medium-term gains and changes to goals, infrastructure, and the way the business works. They could also be lessened or made better by short-term projects that are made to deal with certain risks.

But strategies fail because they don’t tell people about the changes. So, if something changes in the business, in the infrastructure, or in the threat environment and threat landscape, these changes need to be reflected in the ecosystem. If they are not, the plan will not work. The plan as a whole will fail, and adding more controls on top of the ones that are already there won’t help because the weaknesses are still there.

Strategies fail because project risks aren’t managed well. So, whenever you start a project to build a new ecosystem or update an existing one, you should also look at all the risks that come with it. Are your suppliers, your skills, your internal services, and your staff and what they know, all of these things pose a risk that the business may fail.