What is Continuous Security Validation and Why You Need it

-

We all read the headlines about threats to companies' security and the loss of their sensitive data. These attacks and breaches are becoming more targeted and sophisticated, making cybersecurity and minimizing risk a top priority.

Often businesses do not even know their information has been compromised until a third party notifies them.

Unfortunately, no matter how much organizations spend on cybersecurity defense, malicious actors find ways to break through using new tactics and strategies.

Companies must develop a cyber threat model that focuses on critical information assets and high-risk areas.

It is no longer enough to rely on point-in-time snapshots to find and patch security vulnerabilities.

Because the threat landscape keeps changing and point-in-time solutions cannot keep up, more coordinated and sophisticated strategies are necessary to protect businesses from threats, attacks, and breaches.

Hackers and cyber attackers are always looking for weaknesses in an organization's environment, such as overly permissive access rules and misconfigured systems.

Continuous security validation helps businesses decrease security risks through remote access networks, endpoint devices, and security lapses.

What is Continuous Security Validation?

Security validation platforms, unlike traditional security tools, determine organizational security gaps in seconds and then remediate them.

It enables a company to see their security from the cyber attacker's perspective and stress-test its security stance.

To protect their financial position, brand reputation, and essential data, companies need to validate their security controls continuously.

The process must be based on real attack behavior rather than simulations. This ability to operationalize and integrate relevant threat intelligence is a game-changer.

How can companies succeed in evaluating security validation platforms? Security experts must engage in continuous security posture assessment.

What is Security Posture Assessment?

Security posture assessment refers to an organization's overall defense against cyberattacks. It is the practice of continuously measuring, challenging, and optimizing the security controls, policy enforcement, and infrastructure configurations of a company.

The objective is to enable the continual optimization of a company's security stack by testing it and immediately implementing corrective measures.

Before you can understand your cybersecurity posture's effectiveness, conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities across all organizational assets.

Identifying potential weaknesses and risks helps businesses decide the actions they should take first and which will have the most impact on increasing their cybersecurity posture.

As their cybersecurity posture gets stronger, their security risks decrease.

How to Maintain a Strong Cybersecurity Posture

Companies' cybersecurity efforts should be continuous to keep up with hackers and other malicious actors' fast pace.

Build a team of dedicated cyber professionals to monitor an organization's security posture regularly. Their goal will be to stop potential threats before they occur to meet the strong demand for online security.

Organizations should regularly monitor their security posture to avoid potential breaches and threats before they occur.

Promote a strong security culture across an organization so that all employees are aware of the threat landscape.

Why Use Continuous Control Validation?

The main reason to use continuous control validation is to find security gaps before cybercriminals do. Continuous security testing helps defend against the latest threats faster.

If a breach occurs, a company will experience far-reaching effects throughout the business.

• Their reputation will suffer

• They could face expensive lawsuits

• Lost revenues will impact the bottom line

Organizations see the long-lasting impacts of high-profile breaches and understand the importance of data privacy and greater customer trust.

Customers expect their data to be protected, and companies need to have appropriate controls in place.

Therefore, continuous validation of security controls is critical.

It is better to identify vulnerabilities and gaps before an incident occurs. Validating cybersecurity effectiveness is becoming a vital security initiative.

Benefits of Continuous Security Testing

Rather than waiting for a hacker to find exposure points, continuous security testing enables security teams to find and close the security gaps first.

Continuously measuring, challenging, and optimizing security controls will improve a company's security posture and reduce its attack surface. By implementing continuous security validation, organizations can:

• Keep up with fast-paced techniques

• Improve IT operations by reducing time spent on unplanned work caused by security breaches

• Accurately represent the real world

• Fulfill multiple testing requirements

• Address challenges from frequent changes in IT operations and cloud movements

• Prevent unexpected security breaches

• Reduce gaps and exposure times

• Defend against new strains of cyber threats faster

• Provide unique metrics such as average remediation time, maturity of defenses, and cost-benefit analysis

• Fine-tune AI and machine learning solutions by testing how effective they are against cyber- attacks to enable faster detection

Improves Business Continuity

Business continuity has evolved over the years from a company's ability to withstand catastrophic events or natural disasters to include cybersecurity.

With the rapid increase of phishing, ransomware, and other cyberattacks, business continuity becomes even more vital to quickly recover from breaches and large-scale attacks with minimal impact.

Cybersecurity was previously only a regulatory compliance and government mandate issue. It is now a crucial component of organizational profitability and continuity plans.

IT and security must work with company leadership to establish a secure and methodical security validation approach.

Moving from point-in-time security decisions to an adaptive and continuous approach, continuous security validation addresses IT environments' reality.

Rather than potential bad actors causing organizations serious harm, continuous security validation enables companies to identify where attacks have been successful and what can be done about them all the time or on-demand.