Accelerating Your Cyber Security Strategy with Maturity Models

In the years ahead, considering recent highly visible global data breaches, organizations are looking deeper into their security capability maturity model. Gartner recently forecasts that information security products and services will reach $93B in 2018, a 7% increase over 2016. What’s even more astounding is that global cybersecurity spending is predicted to exceed $1 trillion over the next five years, from 2017 to 2021. More from the report here.

Security assessments and penetration testing, the GDPR and Data Loss Prevention (DLP), SIEM technologies, endpoint protection, the rise of managed services and security outsourcing are expected to contribute to this increase.

CEOs and Board of Directors are now beginning to realize the significant impacts of security incidents and inevitable data breaches to their organizations. Remember, organizations now face greater than one in four chance of experiencing a data breach in the next two years according to the Ponemon Institute. Coupled with intense regulatory and compliance concerns, this creates some serious hurdles and roadblocks to the information security landscape.

In this blog, we explore the areas in which organizations can leverage the rise of information security outsourcing to accelerate your organization’s security transformation and its cybersecurity capability maturity model.

What is a Security Capability Maturity Model?

There are many types of security maturity models, the most well-known being the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Models (C2M2) which was created by the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2014. The DOE and DHS wanted to mitigate repeated cyber threats against modern organizations in the United States. The C2M2 aimed to strengthen an organization’s cybersecurity capabilities, enable organizations to benchmark their security initiatives, improve overall cybersecurity competencies, and prioritize security investments.

Today, cybersecurity capability maturity models are delivered in various forms, tailored to the organization to exemplify best practices and establish security standards. Security maturity models are intended to help the organization benchmark their strengths and weaknesses against commonly held best practices and capabilities.

A New Security Capability Maturity Model (SCMM)

We use the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Maturity Levels in measuring Security Capability Maturity and assign numbered levels to them, as noted in the Illustration below; Levels 1 through 5 respectively demonstrate progressively more mature security operations.  As we cycle through five Domains of Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, and Respond, descriptions of Maturity Levels can change, but in general remain the same. This becomes our Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (SCMM). 

Our Cyber Security Lifecycle, as illustrated below, becomes a repeatable and scalable journey to reaching higher levels of cyber security maturity. While the Domains of Protect, Detect and Respond are common elements of an operational security lifecycle, adding the elements of Govern and Identify is a given.

The Security Strategy to Accelerate Your Organization

As you read earlier in the blog, a variety of security categories will emerge as market leaders in the next few years that will increase cybersecurity spending. These security technologies and tools are great, but you need the right security planning and strategy in place to transform your organization.

When dealing with the complexity of building and scaling a mature security program, organizations are looking at security consulting and security outsourcing providers that will offer a customized approach to their business.

As noted in our MSSP Key Consideration blog, you need a security outsourcing provider that knows your business from every facet. The provider should be and have experts in security intelligence, compliance and regulatory requirements, threat detection and response, manage and operate a dedicated Security Operations Center, and deliver a diverse and innovative technology partner ecosystem.

To accelerate your cyber security strategy and transform your organization in the years ahead, you need an experienced cyber security partner to help your organization reach the security maturity levels you would expect.

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