Increasing maturity in Cybersecurity Management

Cloud: Between threats and opportunities

Today, cloud offers a great opportunity to be more efficient when it comes to resources and provides a way to deploy infrastructure and services that, on premise, may not be affordable for some companies. To control the risk, it is necessary to first perform an IT risk assessment and a proper integration with the risk framework of the organization, taking into account the new scenarios that cloud brings to the risk landscape.

COVID-19 brought about a revolution in the world of security insofar that the hybrid work model, with all its new threats, is here to stay. In addition, due to the continuous incidents related to cybersecurity that we hear about every day, organizations have realized the importance of security controls, and in a certain way, it has increase security awareness within companies.

The importance of defining a cybersecurity strategy

Generally, when an incident happens is when the organization realizes the importance of a cybersecurity strategy. It is important to conduct security awareness internally, and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) must make leaders understand (at the Board/Senior Management level) how well-managed security makes the business reliable.

Cybersecurity budgets must be led to manage and deploy the controls that a company needs to mitigate security risks. It is a great challenge to perform an adequate risk assessment aligned with the business processes, that will support to prioritize and make the company understand the controls that are necessary to implement and the cost of not adopting them.

Today, the challenge in cybersecurity is the adequate use of technologies and integration of these elements that, together with improved management of security processes, allows organizations to maximize the ability of these controls to effectively mitigate risks.

The new challenges that CISOs will be facing

Cyber resilience and the ability of systems to recover from failure and maintain persistent service reliability is top of mind for CISOs. This includes the strategy and functions required to maintain continuous delivery of operations during an outage, covering the lifecycle of capabilities required to plan, detect, respond, and improve after an outage related to a cyber failure or attack.

Cybersecurity third-party risk management is being a trendy concept in recent years and refers to the cybersecurity and business continuity risks that a provider could introduce in a company come into play. This is one of the points that regulators are pushing, and new circulars and policies are already in place.

Cybersecurity insurance as a market has its own challenges. When we are talking about cybersecurity risks, the uncertainty when calculating the risks assumed by insurers with their policies means that premiums are too high for this market to advance. Customers want most of the damage caused by a cyber attack covered by insurance, but they have limitations when it comes to paying for such coverage. Proper cybersecurity management could help more effectively qualify and quantify risks, helping reduce the level of uncertainty, allowing this new segment of the insurance market to move forward.

Support the Luxembourg companies

Companies are more aware than ever that they need these security controls in place and focused on endpoint security, identity management, remote access, management of access to resources with multiple authentication factors, security architecture with an adequate segmentation, deception technology, and more. CTG is building strong relationships with top vendors, such as Delinea, one of the most recent additions to our partner portfolio, which is focused on PAM and IAM processes.

During the last three years, CTG has been developing a cybersecurity team that has been focused on helping clients develop and implement cybersecurity tools as they are requested. In most cases, these types of projects pose a great challenge for an IT company due to the high degree of specialization that these tools require when they are implemented. With CTG’s expertise, this is a challenge we’ve helped our clients successfully overcome.

Throughout the journey helping our clients implement these security tools, we have been able to observe that, when it comes to cybersecurity investments, these tools do not contribute as much as they should to an effective risk mitigation if a well-managed cybersecurity strategy is not in place.

The maturity applied to the field of IT security and risk control makes us to provide more attention from a purely technological layer to another technological and managed layer.

Today, with a greater understanding of the needs of our clients in the field of cybersecurity, we want to help them not only implement the appropriate technology for their needs, but also support CISOs in aligning their cybersecurity management processes with the deployed tools.

To help our clients with these security challenges, CTG has a team that includes people focused on technology as well as those focused on consulting and advising on cybersecurity management. They work in an integrated manner that allows us to deliver security projects with a greater guarantee of success and be prepared for the challenges to come.

With this collaborative team, we can help our clients during the entire cybersecurity lifecycle, identifying gaps and supporting them, when necessary, along the journey.

Article by Francisco Alvarez Vicente, Security and Risk Management Officer, CTG Luxembourg PSF for PaperJam Dossier Digital Cybersecurity.

Photo credit: PaperJam