What Is Security Posture?

Security posture refers to the overall strength of an organization’s cybersecurity. It measures how an organization’s mechanisms, policies, procedures and operations respond to and defend against cyber threats.

Continue reading to learn more about security posture, why your organization’s security posture is important, how to assess it and how to improve it.

Why your organization’s security posture is important

Security posture helps organizations understand how effective their security measures are and how prepared they are against cyber threats. By fully understanding your organization’s security posture, you can identify any weak points found within your cybersecurity and remedy them to develop a secure online environment. 

An organization needs to have a strong security posture to help protect confidential data from cyber attacks and data breaches. Having a strong security posture will allow your organization to detect threats and prevent cyber attacks from being successful. Even if an unauthorized user were to gain access to your organization’s network, your organization should have the proper procedures and policies to mitigate the effects of breaches and prevent the unauthorized user from accessing confidential data.

How to assess your organization’s security posture

Cybercriminals are always developing new ways to attack organizations and infiltrate their network. Organizations need to assess their security posture to see how well they can defend against cyber threats. Here are the five steps to assess your organization’s security posture.

1. Identify your organization’s most critical assets

The first step to assessing your organization’s security posture is to identify all of its assets. Your organization needs to have a full inventory of its assets and detailed information about each asset, including hardware, software, data and anything else that can access your organization’s network. This allows your organization to see the status of each asset and ensure that the proper protections are in place. The inventory of assets should also be categorized to find the most critical assets that the organization needs to prioritize protecting.

2. Map out your organization’s attack surface

An attack surface refers to all the possible entry points cybercriminals can use to access your organization’s systems and steal data. After identifying its critical assets, your organization needs to map out its attack surface. By mapping out its attack surface, your organization can see the potential security vulnerabilities and attack vectors cybercriminals could use to gain unauthorized access to your organization’s network. Common vulnerabilities that cybercriminals exploit include weak credentials, unpatched software, lack of encryption, misconfigurations and mismanaged privileges.

3. Threat analysis

Once your organization has mapped out its attack surface and pinpointed its security vulnerabilities, you can run a threat analysis to determine what cyber threats your organization could face. Your organization needs to analyze cyber threats that all organizations face, along with any specific threats to your industry and tech stack.

4. Evaluate your organization’s cyber risk

Cyber risk refers to the probability of a cyber attack happening and negatively impacting an organization. It has an inverse relationship with security posture. Your organization needs to evaluate its cyber risk based on the potential cyber threats it could face. If your organization has a weak security posture, then it has a high cyber risk.  Evaluating cyber risk helps your organization determine which cyber threats present a higher risk and should be prioritized to defend against immediately.

5. Make improvements

After your organization has a full understanding of its assets, vulnerabilities, potential cyber threats and cyber risk, it can develop remedies to address the vulnerabilities and improve its security posture. These improvements will help your organization better protect itself from cyber threats and decrease its cyber risk. 

How to improve your organization’s security posture

After assessing your organization’s security posture, you need to develop improvements that will help protect your business and reduce its attack surface. Here are the ways your organization can improve its security posture.

Implement robust policies, controls and procedures

Your organization needs to implement robust policies, controls and procedures that can adapt to new and emerging threats to improve its security posture. These policies, controls and procedures will help your organization handle cybersecurity incidents and prevent security breaches from happening. Even if a security breach does happen, your organization would be protected by the policies, controls and procedures that can help mitigate the effects.

Your organization needs to include concepts such as least privilege access in its policies to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is a cybersecurity concept that gives all human and non-human users just enough network access to do their jobs and no more. It prevents users from accessing resources they do not need and limits what they can do with the resources they can access. Least privilege access can help reduce your organization’s attack surface, minimize insider threats and prevent lateral movement.

Invest in tools that strengthen your organization’s security posture

Your organization needs to invest in tools that strengthen its security posture. Cybersecurity tools will help your organization have better control over its network and prevent security breaches from happening. Cybersecurity tools that would help improve your organization’s security posture include:

• Privileged Access Management (PAM): PAM refers to securing and managing accounts that have privileged access to an organization’s sensitive resources such as its systems and data. With a privileged access management solution, organizations have full visibility and control over their entire data infrastructure. Organizations can see who is accessing their network, what resources are being accessed and how those resources are being used.
• Endpoint Detection and Threat Response (EDTR): EDTR is software that continuously monitors endpoint devices such as end-user computers and laptops, as well as servers, mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It gathers and analyzes threat data and alerts organizations of breaches in real-time.

Train employees on cybersecurity best practices

To improve your organization’s security posture, employees should be trained on cybersecurity best practices. By training your employees on cybersecurity best practices, your organization can prevent employees from accidentally causing security breaches and data leaks. Some cybersecurity best practices employees should follow include:

• Securing accounts with strong and unique passwords
• Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) whenever possible
• Keeping all software up to date
• Avoiding public WiFi
• Use encrypted password sharing
• Recognizing and avoiding cyber attacks such as phishing

Create an incident response plan

An incident response plan is a set of assigned responsibilities and lists of procedures to follow if an event such as a security breach occurs. Response plans establish clear roles and responsibilities that help facilitate efficient collaboration between team members during every critical moment of an incident, helping to minimize the duration of a cybersecurity incident, reduce financial impact and protect sensitive data from compromise.

Regularly run penetration tests

Penetration tests are security exercises that simulate cyber attacks on an organization’s systems. It evaluates the strength of the organization’s security posture and identifies any security vulnerabilities cybercriminals could exploit. Your organization should regularly run penetration tests to help assess its security posture and identify security vulnerabilities that it needs to address. Regularly running penetration tests will help your organization see how well its security measures would respond to new and emerging cyber threats.

Use Keeper® to improve your organization’s security posture

An organization’s security posture is important to determine how well its security measures would respond to a cyber threat. To improve your organization’s security posture, consider investing in a privileged access manager. A privileged access manager helps organizations secure passwords, credentials, secrets and connections from cyber threats. 

KeeperPAM™ is a zero-trust and zero-knowledge privileged access management solution that combines Keeper Enterprise Password Manager (EPM), Keeper Secrets Manager® (KSM) and Keeper Connection Manager® (KCM) to allow organizations to achieve complete visibility, control and security.