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Benefits of Automating Security Assessments for Your Organization

Findings.co explores the benefits of automating security assessments

It is indeed true that companies that fail to leverage automated tools are overlooking significant opportunities. This hold particularly true when it comes to security and compliance. Companies are finding it increasingly challenging to proactively identify, address, and mitigate security issues, since, well – there’s more threats than ever. Conducting regular security assessments is essential to detect vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of future breaches. However, relying on manual methods and outdated procedures can be unreliable and diminish the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies. To ensure secure and robust networks, as a business leader, you must prioritize the implementation of automated security assessments. They not only minimize risk exposure, but they can shorten the sales cycle and save a company money, and they also strengthen cybersecurity defenses, making it a crucial investment for your company. 

(Source: CISA – Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Learning Program: Benefits of Automating Security Control Assessments)

Automation Speeds Up Reaction and Activity:

Automation plays a vital role in streamlining processes and driving transformation in modern industries. By automating the risk assessment process and management, organizations can make informed financial decisions, streamline risk and compliance procedures, and enhance their overall risk profile. This automation eliminates human error, enables faster response times, and promotes growth. Real-time threat information and risk reports empower security teams to handle threats more effectively and improve response and action times. Automated risk management strategies can efficiently compile, classify, upload, and organize incoming data, which allows for the identification of similar incidents and the implementation of prepared actions or responses.

Enhanced Cybersecurity Risk Management:

Automated assessments provide organizations the ability to manage cybersecurity risks more comprehensively and effectively. These assessments offer security teams up-to-date and detailed data about ALL their vendors that can be shared with senior management and executives. By eliminating manual tasks and enabling real-time monitoring, automation allows risk managers to focus on risk avoidance and mitigation. Furthermore, automation expedites the entire risk management process by instantly uploading fresh data and promptly reporting any issues. Through continuous monitoring and real-time visibility, organizations can identify gaps in their cybersecurity posture and take the necessary security measures to rectify them.

Standardizing Data and Improving Collaboration:

In many organizations, different departments rely on separate and potentially incompatible data to analyze and assess cyber risks. With so much data floating around in different hands, conflicting reports create confusion among managers. Automated security assessments provide a centralized platform for data collection, ensuring consistent and standardized data across the organization. This eliminates discrepancies and enables effective collaboration among departments. Executives and managers can access accurate and comprehensive information, leading to better-informed decision-making and improved cyber risk management strategies.

Scaling Security Risk Assessment:

Automation significantly simplifies the scalability of security risk assessment processes within a company. Automated assessment platforms like Findings are designed to handle both small and large-scale tasks, allowing organizations to adapt to changing demands without the need for hiring and training new personnel. Predictability is another advantage of automation, as most response actions can be anticipated, making it easier to manage various system interactions securely. Additionally, automation provides better tracking capabilities, allowing organizations to monitor progress, identify completed assessment components, and address pending tasks more efficiently.

Measuring ROI of Automation:

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for automated security risk assessment involves considering the time and resources saved by automating time-consuming tasks and preventing adverse outcomes. While evaluating the ROI for automated security risk assessment may differ from other business operations, the goal is to demonstrate to IT management that the investment was worthwhile, considering the resources and time allocated.

Out With the Old, in With the New:

In today’s digital landscape, where cyberattacks are a constant threat, automating security assessments is not just beneficial but imperative for organizations aiming to protect their assets, maintain customer trust, and ensure business continuity. It is an investment that pays off in terms of enhanced security, streamlined processes, and improved risk management.

Collaborating with companies like Findings – who specialize in security risk assessment automation can help organizations identify weaknesses and risks more effectively. Automated security risk assessments provide a proactive approach to maintaining the security of organizational systems, preventing potential breaches, and ensuring a safe operating environment. By leveraging automation, organizations can improve response times, standardize data, enhance collaboration, and scale security risk assessment processes. It is crucial for businesses to embrace automation.


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Finally: Practical Guidance for Supply Chain Risk Management

Businesses are being bombarded with warnings from a variety of sources regarding supply chain risk management – ranging from media organizations like Forbes, to analyst firms like Gartner, and even to the White House, which notes that “foreign governments and criminal syndicates are regularly seeking ways to compromise our digital infrastructure” through supply chain attacks.


However, actual advice for managing supply chain risks is harder to come by. Figuring out where risks lie and working to detect them is an exercise that often falls to individual businesses – which often struggle to put supply chain risk management into practice, given the fact that few organizations were closely focused on supply chain risks until just a couple of years ago, when incidents like the SolarWinds breach brought supply chain risks to the fore.


1. Optimize Supply Chain Visibility

The single most effective step businesses can take to manage supply chain risks is to achieve visibility into their supply chains. You can’t mitigate the risks you can’t see, and if you wait for the risks to impact your own IT environment, it’s too late to prevent them from causing a disruption.


That’s why you need visibility not only into where your software comes from, but also which checks and protections your software suppliers have in place. Believe it or not, vulnerabilities will come from your least expected vendors, and more often than not, your smaller vendors. When you identify vendors who fail to manage risks, you can remove them from your supply chain in order to protect your own organization. This is where continuous monitoring steps in and becomes invaluable to your team by getting ahead of issues before remediation steps are even needed. 


When it comes to supply chain visibility, the more information you have, the better. It’s often impossible to gain complete, definitive visibility into supply chain risks because the “probability and severity of many risks is difficult to ascertain,” as Tucker Bailey, McKinsey Partner notes. But the more information you have about who your suppliers are, how they build out their supply chain and which practices they follow to mitigate security risks, the greater your ability to find and respond to the most serious supply chain vulnerabilities

2. Build Supply Chain Risk Management Into Onboarding

While continuous visibility into the supply chain is one step toward identifying risks, it’s also important to establish a rigorous process for vetting vendors when you onboard them into your supply chain. Identify which specific security controls you expect vendors to have in place, then implement a process that assesses how well they adhere to those practices.


There is always a risk that vendors who meet your requirements during onboarding will become insecure over time, which is why you need to monitor continuously for new supply chain risks. The most common onboarding process would be to do an initial risk scan of the vendor and setting a score. However, the better and more effective method is to set a periodic scan that includes an action plan. 


But even with all these processes, it doesn’t mean you should skimp on vendor validation at onboarding time. Rooting out risky vendors before they even join your supply chain is more effective than identifying risks after the fact.

3. Plan For Supply Chain Changes

Actually removing risky vendors from a supply chain is hard to do if you depend on those vendors and have no alternatives.


That’s why it’s important to ensure that your supply chain is dynamic enough to accommodate sudden changes in vendors. Always have backup suppliers in mind to who you can turn to if you need to stop using one vendor due to cyber security risks.


Supply chains constantly fluctuate. Vendors that seem rock-solid one day may be in the news the next because they are the center of a major breach. You can’t control what your suppliers do, but you can control your ability to pivot to alternative suppliers quickly in order to mitigate supply chain risks.

4. Enforce Continuous Supply Chain Risk Management

Supply chain risk management should never be a one-and-done affair. Nor should you rely on periodic audits to find risks.


Instead, strive to monitor your supply chain continuously. Continuous monitoring means that you can identify vulnerable third-party software, as well as vendors who are no longer conforming to your security requirements, as soon as the risk emerges. That beats waiting until your next audit to identify a risk – or, worse, not identifying it at all because you vetted your suppliers initially and have no mechanism in place for determining when vendors who were once secure no longer are.


Ensure that the protections that your suppliers claim to have in place actually work. For example, as Jay Shaw explained during a recent LSEG event, don’t just take someone’s word for it that backups are in place. Instead, say “you’re going to get a phone call, And that phone call is going to say, ‘Bam, we’re now down, so do the backup plan. We want to see how long it takes you and how well it works.”


It might not be practical to vet every vendor in that way, but for high-stakes suppliers, it’s important to know that promises align with realities when it comes to supply chain security protections.

5. Automate Supply Chain Risk Management With Cyber Solutions

For most businesses, the rigorous, continuous supply chain monitoring and risk management practices described above are impossible to implement manually. They would require too much time, and too much effort on the part of employees who already have overfilled plates.


That’s why it’s critical to leverage cyber solutions that automate supply chain risk management. They can identify multiple types of threat within third-party software – including malware, phishing risks, ransomware and beyond – without requiring manual vetting. And they can do this continuously so that you’re aware immediately when a new risk arises.


Automated cyber solutions have the added benefit of reducing the risk of human error. Your supply chain management tools will operate consistently and reliably, enforcing the same assessment policies over each and every vendor. Humans typically don’t achieve that level of consistency, which means that manual supply chain assessment increases the chances that risks will fall through the cracks.

How Findings can help

As a fully automated platform for identifying and managing risks across your supply chain, Findings makes it easy to put supply chain risk management practices into operation. Findings delivers centralized, continuous visibility into supply chains across any industry, enabling businesses to find and respond to risks before they turn into cyber security incidents.

See for yourself by requesting a demo at Findings.co.

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