Guide to Write an Effective Cyber Security Strategy Action Plan for your Business

by Anika D | Jan 24, 2022 | Business, Cybersecurity

Cyber security strategy is a noteworthy action plan for the organization to secure its assets in the coming years. However, with the emerging technology, cyber threats also change unpredictably. So, you definitely have to upgrade your strategy. It is purely guesswork about what you need to do.

The deliberate result of developing and executing a cybersecurity plan is that the assets are secure. Generally, it involves switching from a reactive to a proactive cyber security approach. There you focus on preventing the cyber threats rather than reacting against them. As a result, you will secure your organization network.

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Your organization can maintain its reputation and reduce threats to its employees by preventing trivial incidents from becoming crucial. However, creating cyber security for the business takes time and effort. But it also means distinguishing between beating your competitors and moving out of business in the future. Below are some basic steps to develop your cyber security strategy:

Step 1: Create an Effective Security Structure

• Determine What you Want to Protect

Understand the assets that your company needs to protect. Although you cannot shield everything fully, focus on what you definitely have to save first and what can happen in the absence of security. Review all business processes and understand how to generate revenue by the company and what systems can disrupt by being unavailable. Also, identify the critical data and IT assets like devices, applications, users, and servers for your business.

• Determine What you Need to Protect Legally

While security and compliance are not the same, most organizations depend on the CISO for maintaining security compliance frameworks. Non-compliance is expensive and threatening for your business. Ensure that you design the cyber security plan with compliance frameworks and plan legal requirements.

• Understand the Company’s Risk Appetite

Before creating a cyber security strategy, understand your organization’s risk assessments. Also, learn the amount of risk your organization can accept while pursuing strategic objectives. Risk appetites depend on the industry, the company’s financial strength, goals, and many more.

The cyber security plan for a startup won’t work for an established corporation. By learning the company’s risk appetite, ensure that you are not under-or-over protecting the business.

Step 2: Understand the Threat Landscape

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After learning what you have to protect, analyze and understand the threat landscape. Initially, understand the company’s environment for its operations. Know your potential customers, product or service you sell, disrupting the business benefits, etc. The questions help you learn about the general environment.

Also, learn about your competitors, threats they face, a security breach in the past, etc. The threats faced by competitors may also affect your business. Finally, learn about the type of threats you need to protect your business from and potential attackers. You can be well-prepared in defending the business by learning the answers to these questions.

Step 3: Create a Strategic Cyber Security Plan

• Pick a Framework, Identify Current State of the Security Environment, and Build a Timeline

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Select a framework such as ISO, CIS Controls, and NIST to build a cyber security plan. It is essential to pick a framework to track progress effectively while prioritizing the critical steps. For example, the CIS Controls gives you a set of prioritized actions to save your organization and take these actions. In addition, it enables you to track progress to know what you have to do.

Once you know what you need to protect from the risk management point of view, evaluate current security measure effectiveness. Decide on a timeline, depending on the current security state. Things will change with time, needing occasional changes in the timeline. However, it is necessary to set a target timeline to get to your organization’s best risk level.

• Evaluate Company’s Security Maturity Level

Evaluate the organization’s security maturity level using either outside consultants or in-house staff. Security maturity means a company’s adherence to security best processes and practices; measuring it allows you to identify areas for improvement.

Whether hiring a consultant or analyzing yourself, ensure that the process is repeatable. In this way, when you determine the security maturity in the coming years, you will have a benchmark for results comparison.

• Evaluate the Technology Stack

Look at your current technology and identify tools you don’t use to their full benefit. Underutilized tools cost you time, money, and increase the attack surface. Then, find out the proper solutions to fulfil their original purposes. In addition, you can use the Cyber Defense Matrix to find security gaps. The Cyber Defense Matrix helps you understand what you need and which products solve your problems.

• Identify Quick Wins and Foundational

While creating a cyber security strategy, identify the quick wins, foundational and high-risk items you must address initially. Then, identify future steps of the plan and prioritize actions. Quick wins are easy to fix things. Therefore, ensure that you have both quick wins and foundational tasks in the beginning.

Step 4: Evaluate Organization’s Ability to Execute a Cyber Security Plan

Finally, assess if your organization can get the necessary work done for security. Observe your current security and IT teams to understand their bandwidth and skill sets. If you don’t have the required resources, outsource some security work or augment your team members to execute the cyber security plan.

During this step,  think about the future of your IT team or the business. Then, see if your IT team can handle any company-wide large-scale projects in the future.

Final Thoughts

The cybersecurity strategy development and implementation is an ongoing process and will face many challenges. Critically, it is important to monitor and reassess the organization’s cybersecurity maturity to measure the progress toward your objectives. The earlier you identify the falling area, the sooner you can report it to catch up.

Measuring progress includes tests and exercises, internal and external audits that simulate future events under various circumstances. Finally, rethink your cybersecurity strategy if a new threat arises. Agility in cyber security is very important. Don’t hesitate to update your plan with changes in security technologies and cyber threats. Or upgrade if your organization acquires new assets that require safeguarding.