What Is Security Posture & How Does It Affect Your Business?

Today’s cybercriminals are getting smarter and finding increasingly sophisticated ways to break into systems - and your business needs to be repaired for this!

Not to mention as cybersecurity grows in complexity, security teams are having to adapt and act quickly. Unfortunately, the ever-evolving technological landscape means that many businesses are left with few actionable insights and poor cybersecurity hygiene.

What can you do about this?

The good news is, there is a way that businesses and their security teams can embrace these challenges and better protect their assets.

By getting a strong security posture in place.

In this guide, we’re going to look at what security posture actually is, how you can assess this and how your posture can impact your business now and in the future.

What is security posture?

According to an article from Balbix, your ‘security posture refers to the overall security status of your software and hardware assets, networks, services, and information’.

Not only this but your security posture also includes the processes you have in place to protect your business from cybersecurity threats. Plus your ability to manage your defences and your ability to address and recover from any security events or breaches.

If you were going to put together a conceptual diagram of your security posture or a posture checklist, it would include the following:

1. Inventory of IT assets

First, you need to take an accurate inventory of all your assets including:

• On-premises
• Cloud
• Mobile
• Third-party assets
• Managed and unmanaged assets
• Applications
• Infrastructure

Once you have a better understanding of your assets, you can go about calculating the security risk of each area.

2. Your current security controls

In order to get a better understanding of your current security posture, you must assess your current security controls. It’s important to determine how effective your security systems are in reducing the risk of an attack. This can help to highlight areas for improvement.

3. Vulnerabilities and risks

Finally, your security posture must highlight any attack vectors. These are the pathways by which a cybercriminal could gain access to your devices or network server.

These vectors can take many different forms including:

• Malware
• Ransomware
• Man-in-the-middle attacks
• Compromised credentials
• Phishing

These can help you to recognise all the techniques that a hacker might use to gain unauthorised access to your assets.

In a nutshell, these three aspects combined (your assets, your vulnerabilities or attack vectors and your existing security systems) make up your security posture.

How to assess the state of your security posture

In order to understand the full scope of your current security posture, you can run what is known as a security posture assessment.

This is your chance to analyse every aspect of your business that may affect your security posture. For example, your security processes, human behaviour and any third-parties that you work with.

The aim of a security posture assessment is to highlight possible gaps in your security systems and to allow you to focus on strengthening those particular areas.

It’s important to run security posture assessments because you can never be too careful. These data-driven insights can help you focus your attention on the weaker areas but can also show you which areas of security your business is doing well.

How does it affect your business?

We’ve discussed the fact that your security posture is important for keeping your assets safe, yet unfortunately many still get this wrong.

Why? It can be easy to think that you're doing enough to protect your assets or to believe that your business (particularly if you own a small business or startup) would never be the target of a cybercrime.

But this simply isn't the case and below we’re going to look at the different ways in which your security posture can affect your business.

Both good and bad.

It impacts your customers and partners

It’s important to remember that it’s not just your business that will be impacted by a security breach, your customers and partners will be affected too.

Think about it, if a criminal is able to gain access to your networks, they might compromise or exploit your customer’s or partner’s data. They could steal it, tamper with it or hold it ransom. Either way, it’s not going to look good for your business!

Not only this but being able to prove you have a strong security process in place can be a great selling point for your company. Customers, clients and vendors will be happier to sign up with a business that has great cybersecurity and can better keep their data safe.

It affects your resilience and recovery time

The stronger your security posture, the more resilient your business will be. Not only does a good posture lower the risk of a cyberattack in the first place but it can also impact your ability to bounce back should you fall victim. With effective systems in place, you can quickly address any security issues or breaches and get back to protecting your data as quickly as possible.

This is particularly important for General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which we’ll look at in more detail below.

It impacts your compliance

Getting a strong security posture in place not only protects your security but it can also protect you legally. This is because running a security posture assessment can help to ensure your security measures are up to scratch and that you’re 100% compliant with GDPR.

This is vital for protecting your data and avoiding huge fines should you fall victim to a cybersecurity attack.

Is it time to strengthen your security posture?

So as you can see, getting a strong security posture in place is important. It is also important that you are continually assessing your security systems and looking out for new vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity can make or break a business and it is certainly something that customers and clients will be concerned about.

So if you're unsure where your security posture currently stands, it could be time to run an assessment and begin making some changes.