An assessment is essentially a health check of your company’s security environment. Many companies spend lots of money on security technologies, without conducting that crucial security evaluation.  Just as we need to establish a regimen to deal with our physical health issues, we need an assessment to understand how to deal with our company’s cyber security issues. You can’t formulate a security program until you have an overall understanding of your IT environment, and its vulnerabilities.  This is exactly what a security assessment provides.

Security technologies, like firewalls, anti-virus software, etc., are all very important. But, do you know if the firewall rules are up to date? Do you know if someone opened up a port for a project, and then forgot to close it after the project was completed? Do you know if the Intrusion protection system (IPS) database has been recently updated? These are all areas of vulnerability. Without assessing your IT environment, you really have no way of knowing the answers with complete assurance.

An annual security assessment can be comprehensive, much like your yearly physical exam, or it can focus on specific symptoms, like data governance and compliance. An assessment can be performed to determine if your company has known compliance issues that must be addressed, or if it has had a security breach, and needs a forensic assessment to discover how it occurred, and what can be done to protect the company for the future. A forensic assessment uses the information from a breach, and works through everything, until it gets to the source of the breach, and then closes that door.

Get the Assessment – Your Business Depends upon it.

If your company has never conducted a security assessment, it should have a thorough, comprehensive evaluation done. This will allow you to discover everything that’s going on, both good and bad.

Based on the assessment findings, the information gathered will diagnose the problem areas. Much like a physical exam result, where the doctor prescribes the appropriate remedy, the information gathered from the assessment is mapped into a strategy that moves the company to a point where it becomes cyber resilient. This means you have the tools, systems, workflows, and if necessary, employee training, to help mitigate threats.

A yearly physical exam is a life protecting assessment that evaluates a person’s overall health. Similarly, since cyber security is a crucial business function, a security assessment is a necessary and invaluable step in protecting your business.