Creating an in-house cybersecurity program from the ground up isn’t an easy task, meaning that many fast-growing businesses rely on managed security service providers (MSSPs) to manage the critical cybersecurity functions needed to keep the business running. MSSPs strive to bring the most value to their customers as they can, which means maximizing the strength of their cybersecurity posture as efficiently as possible with available resources.
Cybersecurity Performance Management (CPM)
Cybersecurity Performance Management (CPM) is a rising framework within the cybersecurity industry that focuses on providing maximum cybersecurity performance with increased budgetary efficiency by tying real-world cybersecurity performance metrics to company objectives around cybersecurity. CPM increases organizational and budgetary efficiencies by empowering decision makers with everything they need to prioritize cybersecurity improvement efforts for the least possible budget spend.
CPM relies on integrations with all your existing cybersecurity tools to centralize and track cybersecurity performance indicators (CPIs), which give you an accurate understanding of how your teams and organizations are performing. For example, if a customer’s organization has a goal of maintaining 95% multifactor authentication enrollment or a 5-day critical vulnerability remediation time, it becomes trivial to measure actual performance against the goal with a dashboard that does all the hard work for you.
With this insight offered by implementing CPM, executives and security leaders can effectively measure the real-world improvements to their cybersecurity posture against budgetary investments. Being able to directly tie and amount of budgetary spend to a specific increase in a key performance metric is key in demonstrating, tracking, and streamlining ROI in cybersecurity improvements.
The best way to kickstart any kind of performance management program is to automate the collection, aggregation, and reporting of relevant KPIs. That’s no different with CPM, where automating the gathering of CPIs is crucial in making the best strategic decisions to reduce business risk. The goal is to tie together as many of your existing security tools as you can into one convenient place where you can run analytics against past and current data. Automation lies at the heart of CPM, but it’s not always feasible to build from scratch.
Providing CPM through Managed Cybersecurity Performance
CPM has several clear benefits to an organization, especially for an MSSP looking to add value to their existing offerings. But it’s just that, a framework. Building out a CPM program from the ground-up is no trivial task, as it requires centralizing performance data from several disparate security tools and developing API integrations that tie all the tools together in a central dashboard. That’s where Managed Cybersecurity Performance comes in.
Managed Cybersecurity Performance (MCP) is a managed service offering that implements CPM for organizations that don’t have the resources or desire to implement it in-house. MCP provides all the benefits of CPM without the up-front costs and administrative oversight that comes with standing up your own solution. As a result, MCP significantly increases the availability of CPM as an extension of existing risk and performance management processes. It helps budget-restricted security teams squeeze every drop of cybersecurity performance out of their tight budget.
MCP as a value-add for MSSPs
This kind of offering is particularly advantageous for MSSPs as a value-add to their existing service offering. Differentiating yourself from the competition is key to succeeding in the market, and this is especially important for MSSPs who compete based on the value they can provide to their customers. MCP helps budget-constrained customers maximize their cybersecurity performance and investment like no other.
MSSPs exist in part to provide protection of their clients’ business-critical assets, but also to provide clarity and visibility into the cybersecurity posture of their client. The visibility provided by MCP can be a unifying force amongst the organization, aligning ordinarily disparate teams with the goal of improving cybersecurity performance. Across the world, organizations of all sizes wrestle with a misalignment in understanding of risk tolerance between upper management and security teams. Often referred to as “risk appetite”, this misalignment creates a mismatch in the amount of risk the team and executives see as acceptable, and it increases the likelihood that the two are not working towards the same objectives. An MSSP offering MCP to its clients can leverage this visibility into cybersecurity performance to greatly facilitate the complicated task of measuring cybersecurity risk.
At this point, it’s clear that organizations need to make a step-change and evolve how they think about and manage cybersecurity within their organizations. Succinctly, when divisions within an organization are unified in mission and approach to cybersecurity, it vastly increases the effectiveness and efficiency of security improvement initiatives. It’s time to move our focus from our activities in cyber to our achievement and value as it relates to the business.