Managing Your Cybersecurity Program for the Win

No matter an organization’s size or complexity, cybersecurity is a team sport. Departments and individuals across the board have a stake in ensuring that assets and data remain secure. Just like a successful sports team, collaboration among the players is essential.

Likewise, the person in charge of a cybersecurity program needs to be able to manage and monitor activities to achieve success. From assigning specific roles to initiating assessments, the right management tools can mean the difference between a winning season or a trip to the showers.

Using Trusted Resources to Gain Team Support

Using trusted guidelines such as the CIS Controls and CIS Benchmarks can help obtain buy-in from stakeholders and staff for any cybersecurity program. The Controls and Benchmarks are consensus-developed, prioritized best practices and security guidelines used by organizations around the world to defend against cyber threats.

Using trusted sources can help get your team on board with assessing the current state of your organization’s cybersecurity, how you stack up with other frameworks you may need to comply with, and how to monitor it all over time.

Upgrade for Effective Collaboration

A cybersecurity program has many moving parts. The right project management tool helps save time, prevents errors and redundancy, offers transparency between team members, and effectively measures compliance.

Say goodbye to spreadsheets

In the past, cybersecurity managers typically had to rely on spreadsheets to keep track of all the activities, assignments, timelines, and resources their team was working on. It seemed like the most effective way to keep everything in one place. However, with the increased complexity of creating and managing a cybersecurity program, spreadsheets may no longer be the most effective way to track progress. With the lack of any automation and continuous manual maintenance, something is sure to fall through the cracks.

Using a tool that offers more than a spreadsheet can be a game changer. For example, a company using the CIS Controls can manage their organization’s self-assessment (at no cost) using the CIS Controls Self Assessment Tool (CIS CSAT). The CIS-hosted version of CIS CSAT is a web application that:

• Facilitates collaboration among team members as they track the organization’s implementation of the CIS Controls
• Allows supporting files to be uploaded including evidence and policy files
• Tracks progress over time and identifies areas for improvement
• Maps to other cybersecurity frameworks and helps demonstrate compliance to auditors
• Compares your results to the average of your industry

All these would be difficult to manage and demonstrate effectively with the use of just a single shared document.

Collaborate like a Pro

Once an organization sees the benefits of utilizing software for their cybersecurity assessments, the next step is to customize the way you perform assessments. Using the greater flexibility available in CIS CSAT Pro, you can optimize the assessment process to match your organization’s specific needs and preferences. CIS CSAT Pro, the on-premises version (now on v1.5.0), provides all of the benefits of the CIS-hosted version with these additional features and benefits:

• Create multiple organization trees to track organizations/sub-organizations and their assessments
• Tailor user roles to your needs by assigning users to different roles for different organizations/sub-organizations and separating administrative roles from non-administrative roles
• Track multiple concurrent assessments in the same organization
• Easily access your tasks, assessments, and organizations from a consolidated home page
• Save time by using a simplified scoring method with a reduced number of questions
• Decide whether to opt in to share data and see how scores compare to industry average

Whether you are using the CIS-hosted version or the on-premises version (which are both being updated for the CIS Controls v8 release coming Spring 2021), CIS CSAT makes the powerful security guidance of the CIS Controls easier for teams to implement, track, and document progress.

Upgrade to CIS CSAT Pro

Regardless of your organization’s size or resources, CIS CSAT Pro can help you manage your cybersecurity program for the win! CIS CSAT Pro is available only through Membership in CIS SecureSuite, the most comprehensive and cost-effective cybersecurity solution available to organizations today.

The much-anticipated Version 8 of the CIS Controls will be released in May 2021. CIS CSAT Pro will be updated accordingly to work with both versions 7 and 8. You won’t want to wait, however; get started now with a CIS SecureSuite Membership so you’ll be ready for CIS Controls v8, and prepared for the cybersecurity challenges yet to come!