Boosting your cybersecurity posture through cost-effective, high performance cyber risk monitoring

Cyber risk monitoring is critically important to help you maintain your desired cybersecurity posture. A stale view of your current state can lull you into a false sense of security – with a rude awakening when a breach happens.

Your information on cyber risks needs to be broad enough, deep enough, and frequent enough to ensure you stay on top of emerging trends and address vulnerabilities before they become incidents.

From continuous cyber risk monitoring to multi-level, third party risk tracking and virtuous risk monitoring feedback loops, the opportunities are there to reinforce cybersecurity and get even more value out of it for your organisation.

Never let your guard down

If cyber risk was a person, it might look like butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth – but only until it snuck up and clobbered you while you weren’t watching. The moral of this story is that cyber risk needs proper surveillance. After cyber risk identification, assessment, and response, cyber risk monitoring is the fourth pillar of a successful risk-based approach to cybersecurity to maintain risk within your risk appetite.

No rest for the wicked

Unlike the lion in the mighty jungle, cyber risk never sleeps. So, if you’re only doing periodic audits of cyber risk indicators like the number of unsuccessful login attempts, it’s a start but it may not be enough. Likewise, given a “new cyber normal” of hybrid work environments and complex supply chains, risk monitoring needs more than once-a-quarter vulnerability assessment or penetration test.

Continuous monitoring offers significant improvement over snapshots in time. Besides seamless statistics and up to the minute dashboards, it also helps correct or replace controls that are weak or poorly designed or implemented. Microsoft offers continuous monitoring and detection capabilities in its cybersecurity solutions such as Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Azure Defender and helps you continuously support your security posture using compliance score or secure score.

How deep is your risk?

Complex supply chains often mean multiple layers of suppliers and outsourcing. Tier one partners may back off part of their contract with you to tier two, then tier three companies, and so on. But the impact of a cyber incident at “tier N” level will frequently work its way back up to a client organisation (like yours) at the top of the chain.

A real-time data view of your supply chain showing the different tier suppliers and how they interlock can help clarify the situation. From this, your organisation can manage its risk by putting in place the appropriate oversight and controls. Microsoft also helps organisations to enhance their risk monitoring in this context with solutions like Microsoft Cloud App Security, extending to third-party applications with features such as analysing reputation context.

Risk monitoring from Dev to Ops and back again

DevOps is a gamechanger for development and operations teamwork. However, when DevOps started, security was often an afterthought. With the realisation that security needed to be included earlier in the software lifecycle, teams moved to DevSecOps (ensure security before release) and SecDevOps (design security in from the beginning).

Like functional fixes and corrections, cybersecurity can also benefit from feedback that is looped back to development from operations. Cyber risk monitoring of software needs to continue after release, with integration of risk surveillance data from the field into the design and development of software updates and new versions. Like other parts of DevOps like continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), automation is a key tool for effective cyber risk monitoring, both before and after release.

Stay alert

Make sure you have the breadth, depth, and frequency of cyber risk monitoring that makes most sense for your organisation. Microsoft’s experienced professionals are available to help you get what you need.