An organization’s security posture is its preparedness for and ability to recover from security threats, including a ransomware attack from internal and external bad actors.
According to a recent State of Data Security and Management Report , 93% of respondents said the threat of ransomware attacks grew in 2023—19 percentage points higher than in 2022. Nearly 50% said their organization had suffered a ransomware attack in the previous six months.
As part of a strong security posture, organizations must be able to identify and respond to attacks and other security risks. Inherently, this requires visibility into all computing and network assets and implementing automated, proactive detection and security controls and processes to protect data.
To improve an organization’s readiness for preventing and dealing with cyber threats and risks, businesses must first understand their security postures.
Yet most organizations lack cyber resilience strategies and data security capabilities to address threats effectively. In the State of Data Security and Management Report, 80% of respondents said they’re concerned that their organization’s cyber resilience strategy can’t address today’s cyber challenges and threats. Concurrently, 33% noted that one of their top challenges is a lack of collaboration between IT and security professionals – a critical factor in improving a security posture.
A team approach to cybersecurity ensures that multi-disciplinary groups and discrete parts of the business work in concert to respond quickly and efficiently to the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Every organization should perform a security posture assessment as a first step to improving a security posture. This action can lead to the rapid identification of its most vulnerable areas. A proactive assessment also allows teams to take corrective actions such as adding automation to reduce manual processes that lead to human errors and instituting AI-powered insights that enable organizations to achieve a higher level of cyber resilience. By scanning their environments, including an array of security configurations, and reviewing other factors such as access control, audit logs, and encryption framework protections, organizations can better understand where they are most vulnerable and quickly remediate critical issues.
Step two to improving a security posture is to become familiar with and vigilant about data security posture management (DSPM). This is how best to safeguard data with technologies and processes that identify sensitive data, monitor, and reduce the risk of unauthorized access to critical data. With DSPM, organizations can better prevent sensitive data from being exposed, exploited, compromised, or stolen by focusing on data and using intelligent automation to constantly test and improve the security mechanisms that guard it.
It is important to have a strong security posture to:
The larger the organization, the bigger its vulnerability to cyberattacks—or its attack surface—can be. The broader the attack surface, the more challenging it is to defend against cyber threats. An attack surface refers to every possible point of entry a bad actor can use to gain unauthorized access to systems and data. That surface gets bigger as teams store a growing amount of sensitive data, use more public cloud capacity and SaaS apps and services, add users—including customers and employees working remotely—and connect more devices to the network. In addition, the failure to update or patch vulnerabilities and the attack surface threat to business continuity loom large.
Without a strong security posture, organizations are more vulnerable to ransomware, including increasing double extortion ransomware schemes.
A strong security posture positions organizations to work quickly and effectively to prevent and, if needed, recover from a cyber incident. An organization with a strong security posture handles security threats and risks methodically, based on security best practices and predefined protocols.
Risk posture measures the security status and strength of an organization’s cybersecurity program. As such, it refers to the strategy, tools, and processes the organization uses to protect itself against cybersecurity attacks. The stronger the risk posture, the better able an organization can predict, identify, prevent, and respond to security threats—even emerging ones.
As part of risk posture, teams using DSPM can identify and monitor sensitive data to reduce the risk of unauthorized access. In its 2022 Hype Cycle for Data Security, Gartner highlighted DSPM technologies’ ability to identify and classify unknown data and detect and alert when a security policy is violated. This technology can even prioritize alerts based on data importance and sensitivity. Organizations all-in on DSPM can begin to prevent and remediate attacks while they’re still in progress to keep their data safe.
Security posture assessments are comprehensive evaluations of an organization’s security and cyber resilience strategies and practices.
In addition to helping teams understand the effectiveness of their security status, measures and tools, it exposes existing vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. By surfacing opportunities for bad actors to infiltrate an environment, an assessment highlights opportunities to close gaps before ransomware attacks, data breaches, or other malicious activities occur.
A security posture assessment also gives organizations insights and actionable intelligence to proactively remediate vulnerabilities and strengthen overall security approaches. A security posture assessment is an important tool in helping organizations keep their data safe amid today’s growing and evolving threat landscape.
Security posture risk assessment best practices include the following steps:
Strong security postures are critical to keeping sensitive enterprise data safe and businesses resilient. Organizations investing in Cohesity data security and data management solutions, built on Zero Trust data security principles and aligned with DSPM tools and best practices, continually strengthen their security postures. They do so by using Cohesity solutions to prevent cyber intrusions, mitigate ransomware attacks, and enable rapid data recovery—if the worst-case scenario of a breach happens.
Organizations trusting Cohesity for backup and recovery also can take advantage of Cohesity DataHawk. It enables the secure recovery of data from immutable and isolated backup options. In Organizations trusting Cohesity for backup and recovery also can take advantage of Cohesity DataHawk. It enables the secure recovery of data from immutable and isolated backup options. In addition to understanding an organization’s security posture and safeguarding sensitive data with comprehensive Cohesity security capabilities, teams can monitor the security posture of their Cohesity clusters from the DataHawk Security Center and continually receive AI-powered recommendations for additional ways to improve their security postures.