Every organization worldwide faces cyber threats on a daily basis. In today’s ever-evolving digital world, there are more security challenges than ever. These challenges include cloud-based vulnerabilities, ever-expanding data sources, and more.
In order to be ready for these challenges, organizations must think about their cyber resilience, which represents their ability to protect themselves from, detect, respond to, and recover from potential cyber threats.
Because of this, businesses started to prioritize developing their threat management systems to defend themselves against potential threats and attacks.
So, what is threat management? And how can it help organizations be more resilient in this climate? Let’s find out.
What Is Threat Management and Why Is It Important?
Threat management in the world of cybersecurity refers to the process of identifying, examining, and addressing an enterprise’s cybersecurity concerns. Generally, organizations use this process to detect cyber threats and minimize any kind of potential cyber risks that might arise.
There are a considerable amount of dangers that companies might face, including advanced persistent threats (APT), mutating software, and vulnerabilities around cloud-based computing services.
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Cloud-based Services, enterprises nowadays face increasing amounts of security threats. This process has led the whole industry to adopt the new mindset and assume that breaches will occur consistently from time to time.
That’s why organizations must have a proper threat management process in place to detect and mitigate risks in a timely manner.
How Does Threat Management Work When Developing an Organization’s Cyber Resilience?
Most organizations have adopted threat management systems that use the cybersecurity framework created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which provides an in-depth understanding of how to improve cybersecurity and information security risks for private sector entities.
The primary functions that the NIST framework stands on consist of 5 essential elements, which are:
- Identify
Cybersecurity teams should have a clear picture of what are their organization’s most valuable assets and resources. In this function, it is important to sort out different categories, such as business environment, risk assessment, asset management, and more.
- Protect
This function covers more physical and technical security controls, and it ensures the development and implementation of relevant safeguards to protect critical infrastructure. The important aspects of this function are awareness and training, data security, maintenance, and more.
- Detect
With the detect function, organizations make sure to monitor their devices and control accesses, investigate suspicious activities, check software, and examine networks for unauthorized connections and users.
- Respond
This is the function where the responsible teams must ensure suitable responses to cyber threats and attacks. They also need to come up with a plan to inform employees, customers, and other stakeholders about occurring events and keep them up to date.
- Recover
Activities in the recovery function include repairing and restoring the infrastructure as well as keeping everyone informed on the enterprise’s recovery activities. This ensures business continuity in case of an attack or security breach.
Most Common Challenges When Managing Cyber Threats
There are many challenges when it comes to improving an organization’s cyber resilience by implementing different threat management systems in a company.
The most common challenges are the following:
- Low level of visibility
Generally, security teams of most enterprises worldwide don’t have a complete view of the whole threat landscape on an organizational level. This includes internal resources as well as external data. However, this can be a crucial element for developing consistent processes when developing an organization’s cyber resilience.
- Lack of reporting
Another challenge security teams generally face is that they don’t track and measure their progress with reporting. The complexity of an IT environment is considerably high, and that creates problems when it comes to setting and measuring different KPIs.
- Burnout and skills shortage
There is a massive skills shortage on the market, and leaders have a tough time finding qualified talent to properly execute their plans. At the same time, the burnout level keeps increasing for the professionals working in this field. To solve this challenge, security leaders have to find new ways to distribute work and achieve results.
In order to solve these challenges, organizations must create defense and response strategies to stop threats more efficiently. This can be part of a cyber resilience strategy, which is vital for business continuity. It increases the organization’s security posture and reduces risks of exposure to an important infrastructure.
What Is the Role of Threat Management in Enhancing an Organization’s Cyber Resilience?
Finally, we can say that building a proper threat management system is essential to enhance an organization’s cyber resilience and ensure a high level of readiness for potential cyber threats and attacks.
Threat management plays a major role in sustaining organizational security. With increasing numbers of cyber threats and system attacks, it can be hard to keep up with mitigation and prevention solutions. Therefore it is important to develop a system to create a better understanding among your colleagues and partners.
By Bruce Goodwill, Vice President Global channels and partnerships at CybExer Technologies
Bruce Goodwill is Vice President Global channels and partnerships at CybExer Technologies, a deep tech cyber range technology company. Bruce has held various global roles leading partner sales and business development teams within large multinational listed organisations and early- stage start-ups across gaming, Insurance and Cyber security industries.