What is a Cybersecurity Assessment and How Can It Reduce Your Cyber Risk?

Cybersecurity assessments are a way to measure how effective your cybersecurity strategy is against a potential attack. The goal of the assessments is to create an action plan that addresses the gaps in your organization’s cybersecurity strategy, reduces your risk, and improves your security maturity, in line with your budget and business goals. Keep reading to learn more about the process assessments follow and the benefits of conducting these types of tests.

Get in the mind of a hacker

Cybersecurity assessments utilize a variety of methods, tools, and techniques that are frequently used by hackers to subject a company’s environment to the same stress they may experience from malicious actors during a cyber-attack

There are several different security assessment types:  

Pentests (Penetration tests): Penetration testing, or pentesting, attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities in a system to determine whether unauthorized access or other malicious activity is possible. This service also identifies which flaws pose a threat to the application and measures the severity of each. Pentests are meant to show how damaging a flaw could be in a real attack rather than find every flaw in a system.

Risk assessments: Risk assessments review your organization’s current practices to identify the most important areas you need to focus your cybersecurity investment and growth on at this time. Often conducted as part of a strategic periodic review or in response to a change in your industry’s regulations or compliance standards, these scans take a deep dive into your existing security practices to identify weaknesses that could affect your security posture as well as your insurance coverage and premiums.

Vulnerability assessments: Vulnerability assessments aim to recognize existing vulnerabilities within an environment and provide a report of recommended remediations to solve for them. Some may include a one-time scan of your environment. Often done in response to a specific event or as a compliance requirement, a one-time scan will find vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, including updating configurations and policies within your existing tool stack, to harden your security posture. The scan will inspect your workstations, servers, Active Directory, and network appliances to identify vulnerabilities on your network.  

Compliance assessments: Compliance assessments review an organization against a compliance framework to determine if they can be successfully certified with that compliance. Compliance standards such as PCI, CCPA, CMMC, SOC 2 or HIPAA require certification from an authorized body to determine if an organization is officially compliant.  

Benefits of Cybersecurity Testing

Recognize Vulnerabilities

Assessments, such as an Offensive Security Assessment (OSA), help organizations understand where their existing blind spots and vulnerabilities lie and allow for proactive remediation of identified weaknesses before they can be exploited. From assessments businesses gain insight into what security measures are working and what needs to be updated to protect them against threat actors attempting to gain access to critical or sensitive data.

Identify Improvements

With the results of a security assessment, businesses can identify the weak points of their cybersecurity protection and reevaluate what their business needs to stay better protected from cyber threats. Assessments like a Cybersecurity Risk & Maturity Assessment will result in a roadmap that a business can follow and align their budget and technical capacity to. A clear outline of prioritized next steps can help with budgeting for better cybersecurity maturity and getting decision makers onboard with what is needed to keep your business safe.

Maintain Compliance

There are many compliance or security standards that a business must adhere to, whether it’s to qualify for cyber insurance or for an industry-related compliance. With a security assessment and compliance consulting, companies can see if they meet compliance and, if not, what security measures are needed in order to hit this goal.

About Entara

Entara offers security assessments, one-time vulnerability scanning, and pentests to put your organization to the test in a safe environment, giving you tangible information on your weaknesses and how you can address them. We leverage the expertise of our cybersecurity services team, CISO, and breach remediation team to replicate the trending attack methods of bad actors based on what we see in the threat landscape.

As an eXtended Service Provider (XSP), Entara employs a range of cybersecurity and technology services to better protect your system, network, and data. Connect with us to learn more about how we can help guide your organization on your cybersecurity journey through our security assessments.  

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