Not every organization's security apparatus is built or funded at the same level.
For smaller organizations or those with other needs competing for budget, here are some points that show it's possible to do more with less.
To drive meaningful progress and ensure a robust security posture, it's the C-suite and the board must collaborate and focus on three key areas: coverage, consolidation, and assurance.
By addressing these critical elements, organisations can optimise their cybersecurity investments, enhance operational efficiency, and proactively safeguard against emerging threats.
1. Coverage
One of the fundamental challenges in cybersecurity is distinguishing between an organization's actions and the outcomes it can control.
Investing significant resources into cybersecurity and doing all the right things doesn't ensure that your organization will avoid a cyber incident. At the same time, businesses can spend nothing on cybersecurity, and remarkably nothing bad may happen.
In fact, many businesses spend zero dollars on cybersecurity and never experience an incident; however, this lack of activity doesn't mean they are managing their risk properly, only that they haven't been targeted.
Most cyber security breaches happen to organisations that are not missing the control required to stop that breach. They just don't have the control deployed to a particular system, at a particular time, or it isn't operating effectively.
At the end of the day, the question shouldn't be 'Are we secure?' but rather 'How well are we managing the elements of security that we need to be managing?
Once an organisation has determined the security controls needed to manage its risk effectively, the key becomes monitoring the degree to which those controls are fully implemented. How compliant are you with your patching policy? Do you really test all your web applications? Do all your databases implement encryption of sensitive data on storage?
Organisations are large and complex, and IT environments of any size will always have edge cases that make security difficult: systems that get spun up in an emergency don't get tested on time; key applications that stop working when a patch is applied so go unpatched for a period of time; and so on.
As a result, achieving 100% coverage consistently is impractical (or unreasonably costly).
Focusing on getting existing controls from a 95% coverage level to a 99% or 100% coverage level, will often get significantly greater value than adding more partially deployed controls. Over time, organisations can increase these thresholds, gradually improving their security environment while aligning with risk tolerances.
