In the first post in this series, we talked about the ways the security industry is broken. We then looked at 6 steps every CISO can take to help their organisation operate more securely without driving up their security budget.
These 6 steps are to:
- fix the (real) root causes of incidents
- develop stronger relationships with other areas of the business
- adopt a threat-informed approach based on MITRE ATT@CK
- shift to “purple teaming”
- close the feedback loop on performance
- work with a security partner that’s focused on optimisation
Taking any of these 6 steps on its own will allow you to shift the effectiveness and cost base of your security operations in the right direction. However, you’ll see even greater benefits when you start to put them together.At Bright Cyber, we help organisations like yours to make that journey. We work across 4 areas that not only tackle the 6 steps we’ve outlined above but ensure you bring together people, process and technology in a sustainable and scalable cybersecurity program that protects your organization in the ways that matter.
1. Human cyber resilience
Cyber resilience is the ability of your organisation to prevent, identify, respond to and recover from cyber security incidents. The security industry has typically focused on selling more and more technology to achieve this goal, but the real key to delivering cyber resilience lies in the right combination of people and processes — something we call human cyber resilience – as well as technology
At the heart of our services to enable you to optimise your human cyber resilience is our Positive Intelligence programme for security leaders. This is designed to help security leaders become more effective board members and stakeholders, more capable of driving the culture and building high-performing teams, while increasing their personal resilience by improving their own wellbeing. We also provide a range of services around security training and awareness to develop the skills of the rest of the security team and the business as a whole. Finally, we can boost the resources and skills available to you through consultancy, security testing services — including penetration testing — and access to leadership expertise in the form of our virtual CISO and virtual DPO team. Learn more here.
To optimise your processes, we can help you implement an integrated security management system that uses a common methodology and management platform to handle governance, risk and compliance (GRC) across multiple standards. By working in this integrated way, you can implement and manage your GRC obligations more easily, quickly and cheaply.
We also have the expertise to help you tackle specific aspects of your GRC requirements, including information assurance, data protection and GDPR, development and implementation of security policies and implementation of frameworks ranging from ISO 27001 to MITRE. Learn more here.
2. Security optimisation
While we can help organisations to benefit from optimising individual aspects of their people, process and technology, the key shift is to ensure all these elements reinforce each other. We believe the best way to do this is by implementing a threat-informed defence strategy, an advanced approach to security that uses a framework like MITRE ATT@CK to understand the specific threats and risks the organisation faces and align people, processes and technology around those threats and risks.We can guide CISOs through the steps involved in operationalising the MITRE framework, including:
- improving processes for testing, evaluating and strengthening the organisation’s defences by moving to purple teaming so that attackers concentrate their efforts on testing the most important systems and data, while the defenders use insights about how attacks are mounted to develop new and better security strategies
- adopting an appropriate management system to measure, manage and progress their security and meet compliance and regulatory demand
- introducing enabling technologies such as continuous automated security validation (CASV) tools like AttackIQ to allow the security team to concentrate on more skilled work
- encourage people to make the most of the opportunities offered by adopting a threat-informed approach to develop their skills and handle more interesting work — all of which will help the CISO retain staff and build a high-performing team
Whether you need help with optimising specific areas of your security operations, or with implementing a more advanced security approach, we help you to move from “more” to better security.
3. Advanced Protection
Our focus here is on helping you to choose the right technologies from the bewildering array of options on the market and then deploy them successfully. With decades of industry and technical knowledge, we help you cut through the marketing claims of vendors with no-nonsense advice, technical solutions that work and implementation services that deliver on time and on budget. We help you identify and get the most value out of technologies that:
- Offer advanced functionality like automation and optimisation, rather than simply providing commodity solutions
- improve security incrementally and meet the test of significantly reducing risk, cost and complexity
- solve problems in new and better ways.
You can learn more about our technology solutions here.
4. Incident readiness
We not only help you develop plans for responding to incidents but also the capability to act on those plans and correct and recover — quickly — from incidents when they happen. Our focus is on supporting you to create simple, clear processes, using robust tools, that allow your cyber team to operate under pressure as they defend against attacks and data breaches.
You can also turn to us if you’re under attack or have already been breached. Our free incident response service gives you immediate access to a UK-based team of professional responders who are available 24/7 to provide incident response and urgent monitoring services. In a matter of minutes, our team will deploy agents across hundreds to thousands of endpoints to scan, analyse, identify and remediate threats before any further damage is done.
You’ll get immediate and complete visibility throughout your organisation, with access to a range of reports ranging from executive summaries to detailed IOCs (indicators of compromise) that can be exported for consumption by other systems. As part of the service, we’ll provide you with a dedicated IR project manager who’ll keep in touch with you at least daily and typically every few hours in the early stages of your recovery. And at the end of the incident recovey process, you’ll have the option to keep our tech installed to secure your systems against future breaches.
Putting people at the heart of cyber security
Our goal in every engagement is to improve the cyber resilience of your organisation through human cyber resilience, advanced protection, security optimisation and incident readiness. Above all, we never forget that people sit at the heart of security. While technology and process have a role to play, we know that creating a high-performing team — that encompasses our own cyber security specialist and your partners as well as your own people — is the key to maximising the resources available to you.
That’s why we’re leaders in using people as a lever to improve cyber resilience. We’ll help you to increase their skills and capabilities, through access to training for you, your security team and the wider organisation. This includes free enablement courses on security leadership, operationalising MITRE, purple teaming and many other aspects of security.
We’ll also bring our expertise in process and technology to bear, enabling you to support your people with well-designed processes and appropriate tools that allow them to spend more time on higher value activities like threat hunting, rather than routine and repetitive alert monitoring — making their roles more effective and less stressful while providing them with opportunities to continuously develop their expertise in protecting your organisation.
Our 3-stage customer journey explores the specific needs of your business, to make sure we’re always suggesting changes that are relevant for your organisation and that prioritise resources and activities to deliver sustainable success for the whole organisation. We’re not swayed by the latest industry trends and buzz words: we evaluate every option carefully and we’ll never recommend a particular solution or approach — no matter how fashionable — if we don’t think it’s right for you.
In short, we think we’re the perfect partner to help you navigate a broken security industry that’s focused on spending more rather than doing better. If you’d like to find out more about what we could do for your cyber security team, download our Security Optimisation Overview or get in touch with us for an initial consultation.
Book a consultation here.
