How to Gain Traction on Your Cybersecurity Program

In the ever-evolving field of cybersecurity, threats are constantly changing. That’s why maintaining an adaptive security and compliance program is crucial. However, compliance isn’t simply a check-the-box exercise—it requires continuous improvement and consistent alignment throughout an organization. So, how can you be sure you’re gaining traction in your cybersecurity efforts? 

Taking small steps like staying up-to-date with industry blogs and webinars, attending training sessions, and communicating common themes you’ve noticed across your organization are excellent ways to begin to gain traction in your cybersecurity efforts. Then you can begin to think about cybersecurity certifications and designating a group of security leaders within your organization to achieve continuous improvement.

In this guide, you’ll learn more about gaining traction with your organization’s cybersecurity program through alignment, processes, and people.

Gaining Traction with Alignment 

Organizational alignment on a cybersecurity program with short and long-term goals is crucial. Once you’ve established your goals, you can start to track how your organization is gaining traction through regular meetings and communication. Here are some ways to work on alignment within your organization: 

Conduct a risk assessment: If you’ve already performed a risk assessment, establish a regular meeting cadence to ensure everyone from leadership down is on the same page with cybersecurity initiatives. Use the risk assessment as the leading point for the agenda for these meetings—after you’ve identified security-related risks, you can create action items to remediate those risks. 

Update your stakeholders: Another key part of regular meetings is to follow up on action items and provide status updates to key stakeholders. These meetings also offer the opportunity to discuss any or potential issues. Depending on your organization, these meetings can be held quarterly or monthly. 

Create a book club: You can also use security-focused meetings to keep everyone up-to-date on cybersecurity trends or breaches. One strategy is to use security meetings as a book club—everyone reads a book, article, blog, or listens to a podcast before the meeting about a relevant cyber trend. Dedicate part of your meetings to discussing what they learned and how it may affect their organization. 

Update internal teams: If your organization is working towards certifications or reports, meetings are a good time for regular internal updates on the progress. 

Gaining Traction with Cybersecurity Processes 

The most important thing organizations can do to gain traction in their cybersecurity program is to prioritize security from the beginning. Whether it’s a new process or product, it’s much easier to implement security measures early on instead of returning later. 

Use your compliance posture to communicate to your current and future customers and stakeholders. There are always new certifications or ways to refresh existing ones. Instead of working towards a SOC 2 and stopping there, continuously research and identify ways to strengthen and improve your security program. 

Having an automation-first mindset can also help you to improve your processes continuously. Ideas can naturally flow when you determine what manual activities can be automated so that you can focus more fully on the real prize: security. 

Gaining Traction with People

Most organizations have annual security awareness training, which is important, but it’s equally important to think about your people from an ongoing perspective. Here are a few tips for prioritizing security awareness while gaining traction in your cybersecurity program. 

Develop Role-Based Security Awareness Training

Since employees have unique responsibilities and interact with different systems and data in their specific roles, they need to know different things about security. Simply educating a DevOps engineer on identifying social engineering attacks isn’t enough—they should also know how to apply security in each aspect of their day-to-day jobs. 

Here are a few steps to getting started: 

• Identify any sensitive information within your organization and the roles that interact with that sensitive information.

• Determine who will need tailored or specific security training, starting with your compliance requirements. 

• Conduct basic security training for all employees who work from a computer and have an email account. 

• Consider specific training for other roles such as developers, accountants, HR, and privileged access users. 

• Provide a one-pager outlining expectations and responsibilities for employees who don’t use a computer. 

Measure the Effectiveness of Your Training Program

There are a few metrics for measuring the success of a training program, including the number of people who completed their training and the time it takes for an employee to complete the training after onboarding. Organizations can also measure the increase in security reports. When employees report security issues or phishing emails, it shows the organization that security training is working. Additionally, real-time feedback from associates can help leadership determine any necessary changes to security awareness training. 

Measuring Your Traction

It’s not enough to simply set your goals—you’ll need to track your progress to continue guiding your organization in the right direction. A cybersecurity scorecard can be valuable for measuring traction in your cybersecurity program; it provides a quantified measurement against a predetermined key performance indicator (KPI). 

Cybersecurity KPIs

KPIs should be both digestible and actionable. Raw data alone isn’t helpful to organizations unless you present it in a widely understandable way. For example, simply measuring the number of open vulnerabilities doesn’t provide much insight, but measuring the percentage of issues closed on time does. 

KPIs should also be measurable. In the cybersecurity scorecard, there needs to be a clear definition of success for each KPI so that anyone can glance at it and understand whether any issues may arise. 

Critical KPIs are highly specific to each organization depending on their industry, relevant laws and regulations, and risk appetite. Organizations may also build their KPIs around customer commitments. 

Here are six KPIs that organizations should consider: 

1. Percentage of devices on the organization’s network unpatched within your internal service level agreement (SLA) 

2. Eliminate unknown devices on an organization’s network

3. Open security incidents with a severity measurement

4. Percent of all accounts without multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled

5. Number of users with privileged access to critical systems 

6. Reduce open risks from security assessments

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, continuous adaptation is crucial. Applying strategies like regular risk assessments, security-focused meetings, and role-based security training, organizations can gain traction in their cybersecurity efforts. A comprehensive approach including the implementation and measurement of alignment, processes, and people ensures not just compliance but a robust and proactive cybersecurity program.

Audora is here to help you gain traction on your cybersecurity program. Contact us today to learn more.