Improving Your Security Posture in 3 Easy Steps

Security posture, which is the aggregate security status of all assets in your organization, has an inverse relationship with cybersecurity risk. If you strengthen your security posture, you reduce overall risk. Sounds great in theory, but aren’t all infosec teams trying to reduce risk via a stronger security posture? What is the practical starting point for getting this done?

1. Inventory and Categorize All Assets

Since security posture requires us to identify the overall security of all assets in our network, the first step is to identify those assets. Below is a screenshot from the Balbix dashboard for an organization that has just over 50,000* assets. The system automatically discovered and categorized these assets, and will continue to modify the inventory as it changes.

2. Identify the Biggest Risk Drivers

Now that we have identified all assets, let’s look at an alternative view of this chart – a heatmap that describes risk likelihood and impact of a breach by asset type.

As the legend indicates, the size of each bubble represents the impact, or business criticality, of the asset grouping that the platform automatically created. The color represents the likelihood of a breach. In simple terms, we really don’t want to see any big red bubbles on this chart. I have hovered over one of the big red bubbles in the screenshot – this one represents mission critical Windows Servers. There are only 39 assets in this group, but they have a high likelihood and they run important data and applications, so they are driving a lot of the cyber risk in this organization. 

 

3. Remediate Highest Priority Risks

In order to have the biggest possible impact on security posture improvement, this organization should focus on making the big red bubbles into big green bubbles. Taking those 39 mission critical Windows Servers as the starting point, the screenshot below shows prioritized risk insights, which are the sets of improvements that will have the greatest impact on overall risk reduction. 

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