When it comes to securing your enterprise, ensuring basic cyber hygiene and proving compliance with industry standards is best practice. But what happens when compliance means simply checking a box at one point in time? Best practices may not adequately protect your increasingly complicated enterprise. Look at it this way – if your organization was a high-speed jet, would your cyber risk management team be ready for take-off?
In the aviation world, a long checklist of control and capability verification must be completed before take-off, mid-flight, and landing. Things can change in the blink-of-an-eye, and with high risks, pilots don’t take chances. Aviators continuously monitor instruments like the fuel gauge, airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, and more. These instruments enable the pilot to monitor key components and environmental factors that are crucial to successful flight and navigation. But what if the pilot is using data from a few miles back? Or only has a subset of instruments? And, what if the path ahead is shrouded in clouds? You might laugh. You might scream. Bottom line – that is not a good situation.
The same is true in the cyber world. You can’t defend your networks and systems if you don’t have a “SOC-pit” with a full set of risk management “instruments”. See what we did there? Sure, you can pass an audit or assessment here and there with a lot of manual effort, static reports, and excessive labor costs. You’ll feel relieved that you finished the evaluation, but that’s not going to improve your security. Additionally, manually collecting evidence for audits and assessments is not an efficient use of your limited resources.
So where do you stand?
Would you pilot a jet where your instruments are fed by a team of people manually generating and delivering static reports of engine temperature, airspeed, altitude of the aircraft, and the direction you’re headed? Of course not! In the time it took to get you that information, you’d be halfway from Seattle to D.C. Even with the increasingly dynamic and dangerous cyber threat environment, many organizations continue to operate this way when it comes to cyber defense and risk management, e!
Avoiding a crash is not the solitary focus in the aviation industry. The goal is to fly in bright blue skies, with no turbulence, and a fully functioning machine. Flawless operational security is the goal in the cyber world, but very few organizations aim to operate at that level.
Believe it or not, there is an easy way to keep your enterprise’s SOC-pit running like a pristine F-35 versus the Wright Flyer. “Flying” through audits and assessments is a whole lot easier and cheaper than you think. Real-time risk management is the future. Check out our solutions here and request a demo if you want to hop in our “flight-simulator” with all the instruments you need–not only pass your audits, but to secure your enterprise as well.
