Understand And Improve Your Incident Response Maturity Level
- Last updated on
- October 1, 2021
- at 11:50 am
A proper understanding of the incident response maturity level is important for an organisation’s cybersecurity. Incident Response management is a process that keeps growing continuously. Reaching a maturity level takes time, effort, knowledge transfer, training, and experience. As attackers apply innovative tools to attack, it becomes more important than ever to plan for the ever-evolving threats. Cybersecurity and incident response maturity levels depend upon multiple challenges. Your cybersecurity maturity levels will be determined by how well you can mitigate these problems.
How To Measure And Improve Your Incident Response Maturity Level
Measuring the incident maturity level involves overcoming the challenges defined in your organisation. There are many frameworks in place which can help your organisation and guide you in your journey towards defining and measuring your incident response maturity levels.
1. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The cybersecurity framework from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) allows you to effectively manage your cybersecurity risk. The framework defines actions and desired outcomes. These actions are based on the incident response reporting methodology – Identity, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover.
2. Crest-Approved Incident Response Maturity
The Crest-approved incident response maturity model enables the assessment of an organisation’s cyber incident response capability. The assessment tool contains a maturity model that consists of 15 steps within the 3-phase cybersecurity process – Prepare, Respond and Follow up.
Why Is It Important To Know Your Incident Response Maturity Levels?
Knowing the cybersecurity maturity levels can be very useful, especially when it comes to monitoring the internal objectives within departments and across your organisation. For example, it helps to understand whether you have the required systems, resources, and knowledge necessary to mitigate cybersecurity challenges and meet your goals, and if you don’t, then it will help you make the necessary changes. Cybersecurity maturity levels will also be a very important factor for insurance companies when they provide insurance coverage. In addition to this, the POPIA and GDPR regulatory laws also require a level of cybersecurity maturity. That is, you will need to demonstrate whether you have the necessary controls to protect personal information to be compliant.
What Maturity Level Does Your Organisation Need?
To manage cybersecurity incidents effectively and promptly, it is important that your organisation builds an appropriate incident response process. The maturity level can be assessed by the NIST or Crest-Approved frameworks mentioned above. Do remember that there are other frameworks to consider.
The models described are based on traditional and proven maturity levels ranging from 1 to 5 (1 being the least effective). Different types of organisations will require different levels and will not have an exact requirement.
The actions and steps defined in the frameworks outline the processes for handling further incidents within your organisation. The model you use will depend upon your organisation. The level of maturity along with weighted scoring determines the maturity level of your organisation.
What Is The Next Step?
Conducting periodic maturity level assessments will help your company monitor improvements in incident response maturity levels. Knowing where you stand also helps in determining what you need to do in order to get to the next level. Understanding the maturity position also allows for more efficient and appropriate resource allocation and at the right time.
Contact the Team at SecuriCentrix to learn more about Managed SIEM and Incident Response Maturity Assessments.