As the New Year approaches, we sat down with Lisa Young. As part of Axio’s leadership team and VP of Cyber Risk Engineering, we were eager to discuss the evolution of cybersecurity maturity into 2021 and our exciting world of risk management.
Axio would like to congratulate Lisa Young, Vice President of Cyber Risk Engineering for her appointment to the Board of Directors of (ISC)², the world’s largest nonprofit association of certified cybersecurity professionals.
Axio is excited to announce our partnership with NFP. NFP is a leading insurance broker and consultant with expertise in employee benefits, property and casualty, retirement, and individual solutions. With this partnership, Axio released a new platform Axio360 QuickQuant, to expand cybersecurity capabilities.
With the power to decide how to allocate budget, the CFO plays a difficult and important role in cybersecurity investment decisions. As mentioned by Hugh Taylor in a recent article for The Journal of Cyber Policy, the challenge is “getting CFOs and boards to understand the financial impact of cyber threats.” Axio’s CEO, Scott Kannry, shared insights into how to alleviate this conundrum.
As the world recalibrates to the new normal, we’re giving back to the community by releasing our most popular assessment tools for free. Starting today, anyone can have an accurate and holistic view of what’s at risk in their organization. Cybercriminals, fraudsters, and others with malicious intent have no right to prevent you from sleeping well at night. We’ve all been through enough uncertainty in 2020. The future may be unpredictable, but it’s completely manageable when you know your worst-case cyber scenarios.
In protecting an organization from cyber risk, clarity about the effectiveness of its cybersecurity program is imperative. The organization must understand its security posture and identify gaps in safeguards to ensure that security investments align with the organization’s risk appetite. Performing assessments using a reference framework, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), provides the means for evaluating current cybersecurity posture and potentially identifying risk for further analysis. Additionally, the use of NIST CSF to create a current profile (where the organization stands at the time of the assessment relative to each control) and a target profile (where the organization would like to be at some future date relative to each control) helps in identifying gaps in a cybersecurity program and establishing areas for improvement in a consistent and methodical manner.
Companies around the world have fallen victim to cyber adversaries. The detrimental effect of a successful attack can make it difficult for companies to recover. Because of many potential risks, cybersecurity has become an essential part of running a business. Cyber risk management is the process of pinpointing potential cyber threats and systems vulnerabilities and addressing concerns to secure your organization. Many aspects of our organizations and communities are digitally connected. It’s important to capture potential cyber threats across different business functions and continuously be on the lookout for emerging dangers.
Cybersecurity frameworks help you achieve better cybersecurity by serving as a collection of best practices, standards, and guidelines. They are built by experts to help organizations reduce risk and remain resilient. A framework helps you identify the current state of an organization’s cybersecurity program and subsequently provides the necessary information to build an improvement roadmap. Because there are so many cybersecurity frameworks to choose from, we decided to narrow down the universe to the top 5 we feel are the most valuable and well-respected. This list is obviously subjective but most of the frameworks included are household names in the world of cybersecurity.
When it comes to cybersecurity risk management, we are often asked how to implement the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Before diving into the answer, we’d like everyone to know it can be an enjoyable and rewarding process. You can get started immediately for free as a single user, with NIST CSF in the Axio360 platform. It’s based on our belief that everyone should have the best possible cyber risk management experience.
With cyber threats prevalent in almost every industry, cyber risk assessments are an essential part of securing your organization. An assessment allows you to identify and understand which assets in your organization can be affected by cyber incidents. It measures what processes and controls you currently have in place to defend against potential cyber events. Similarly, NIST defines cyber risk assessment as “The process of identifying risks to agency operations (including mission, functions, image, or reputation), agency assets, or individuals by determining the probability of occurrence, the resulting impact, and additional security controls that would mitigate this impact.”