Organizations face endless challenges, especially now when everything revolves around tech. These range from sophisticated cyber threats to commonly ignored compliance requirements. However, amidst the rapidly evolving cyber threat realm, organizations must protect sensitive company data for various benefits. Being cyber-secure and having a healthy cybersecurity posture preserves and improves customer trust and business continuity.
How to Protect and Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture
One of the key components of a comprehensive organizational cybersecurity posture is attack surface management (ASM). This revolves around looking for and finding ways to stop potential cybersecurity issues. Below are a few ways attack surface management improves your company’s cybersecurity.
1. Risk Reduction
ASM plays a significant role in reducing cybersecurity risks. Attach surface management helps address various vulnerabilities within your organization’s digital footprint. It allows your cybersecurity teams to find and prioritize vulnerabilities. As such, they get ample time to stop these risks at an early stage.
Reducing the attack surface, which is the entry point that attackers exploit, significantly lowers the likelihood of successful attacks. ASM tools continuously scan and assess your organizational digital footprints for vulnerabilities such as weak security controls and software flaws.
Attack surface management also plays an important role in patch management. Identifying digital systems that require updates ensures timely patches and updates are made. This closes the gaps and reduces the likelihood that present vulnerabilities get exploited. Generally, systematically identifying and prioritizing system vulnerabilities and weaknesses in attack surfaces minimizes organizational exposure to cyber threats.
2. Incident Response
Incident response is an important cybersecurity element. Having an incident response strategy reduces the time it takes to respond and bounce back from an infiltration. Attack surface management helps businesses detect and respond to cybersecurity issues effectively by providing in-depth visibility into their vulnerabilities in the following ways:
- Early detection: Cybersecurity professionals conducting ASM continually monitor the organization’s attack surface for signs of compromise or unauthorized access.
- Threat hunting: ASM empowers cybersecurity teams to conduct proactive threat hunting for signs of compromise or malicious activities. ASM tools help organizations identify hidden threats and emerging attack patterns.
- Incident triage and prioritization: Through ASM, organizational incident response teams can triage and prioritize cybersecurity incidents based on potential impact on company data and business operations.
Integrating attack surface management into the incident response process helps organizations adopt a proactive approach to cybersecurity. This allows for a coordinated response to potential and emerging threats.
3. Improved Resilience
Improved resilience is the other key outcome of proficient attack surface management. Better resilience makes it possible for organizations to withstand and recover faster from cybersecurity incidents. Attack surface management involves continuous monitoring of your organization’s digital assets to identify and address weaknesses.
Introducing measures that adapt to arising cybersecurity threats helps organizations remain resilient to cyber threats. ASM also provides a solid base for agile incident response. Security teams can quickly pick up and respond to potential threats. This significantly minimizes the impact of successful attacks on your business operations.
Organizations can effectively improve their resilience against threats by embracing ASM in their cybersecurity strategies. Adopting these proactive measures improves your ability to withstand and recover from an attack.
4. Cost Saving
An effective ASM also has cost-saving benefits to businesses and organizations. For starters, a good ASM helps identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in your organization’s digital infrastructure. This prevents breaches and incidents that cost your organization in terms of remediation efforts, legal fees, and damaged reputation.
That aside, a proper ASM reduces downtime and disruption. Cybersecurity incidents like DDoS attacks significantly disrupt business operations. This leads to downtime and disrupts productivity. Attack surface management minimizes the occurrence of such incidents. ASM similarly improves operational efficiency. Automating various aspects of threat detection and vulnerability management improves your organization’s operational efficiency.
ASM also saves costs by streamlining compliance efforts. Well drafted attack surface management ensures that organizations remain compliant with various industry regulations and data protection guidelines. Meeting compliance requirements proactively helps businesses avoid non-compliance penalties.
5. Better Visibility
Proper visibility of your digital systems is the backbone of an effective cybersecurity strategy. Attack surface management improves visibility into your organization’s digital assets and vulnerabilities in many ways. ASM solutions like network scanning and asset profiling regularly take an inventory of the organizations’ digital assets and possible attack surfaces.
Attack surface management also provides real-time monitoring of your businesses’ attack surface for potential vulnerabilities. Real-time monitoring makes it possible for your cybersecurity teams to detect suspicious activities in their early stages. Early detection of potential vulnerabilities also promotes risk prioritization.
Cybersecurity teams use ASM tools to gather insights into the potential impact and severity of identified vulnerabilities. This allows them to prioritize mitigation efforts based on the level of risk exposure.
Proper attack surface management is a key foundation of a robust cybersecurity posture. It gives organizations the requisite tools and insights required to strengthen their defense. Managing the attack surface improves the organization’s visibility into potential threats and vulnerabilities.
