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Your organization’s security posture plays a crucial role in improving its operational stability and reputation and accessing better sales opportunities. It helps stakeholders see how well you’re able to safeguard the organization from data and security threats and respond to the changing demands of risk management.

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Managing an organization’s security posture is a complex process as it involves contribution from several team members. Typically, your security posture is made up of various dynamic components and controls, and understanding them fully is the first step in the process.

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In this guide, we’ll discuss everything you should know about your security posture, most notably:

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• Definition and components of a security posture
• The importance of assessing your organization’s security posture
• Actionable steps for assessment
• Tips for improving and monitoring your organization’s security posture

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What is security posture?

Security posture is a detailed representation of your organization's cybersecurity maturity and measures, including policies and controls implemented. It communicates your organization’s ability to proactively identify threats, implement sufficient security measures, and remediate incidents quickly and effectively.

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Maintaining your security posture requires you to map security components and enable visibility into them at all times. While doing so can involve a considerable amount of time and effort, it’s crucial to an organization’s continuity and growth.

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5 components of an organization's security posture

An organization’s security posture is comprised of the following key components:

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1. Data security: All your data, including customer information, requires comprehensive protection from external attacks, unauthorized internal access, and other threats that your security team should identify and remediate.
2. Network security: From firewalls to network access policies, you need to set up effective controls to ensure a safe environment.
3. Endpoint security: With the rise of remote work, ensuring endpoint security is an essential component of safe and responsible business practices. 
4. Vulnerability and threat management: You must continuously monitor your systems and networks for vulnerabilities and threats so that you can implement remediation measures before a malicious party gets a chance to exploit security loopholes.
5. Third-party security and risk management: Third-party risk is present in most business environments today due to the use of SaaS tools and services, which expand your attack surface. You can minimize it with an robust third-party risk management (TPRM) strategy to identify, prioritize, manage, and monitor such risks.

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Why should you assess your security posture?

Assessing your security posture helps security teams evaluate an organization’s current ability to stay safe in an evolving risk environment. The goal is to take informed action and improve security components.

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Without understanding the state of your existing measures and controls, you can’t know what needs addressing. Your organization might also fall behind on industry-standard practices if you leave your security posture unchecked for too long.

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Here a few more reasons why assessing your security posture is important:

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• Effective compliance management: Robust security is among the key requirements of many regulations and voluntary standards. Knowing where you stand helps you conduct an effective gap analysis and take action to ensure complete compliance.
• Increased stakeholder trust: Your security posture directly impacts your organization’s appeal from the perspective of customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Security posture assessments help you identify new ways to build trust and improve transparency.
• More growth opportunities: Your organization can’t scale confidently if there are unidentified vulnerabilities in its systems. By assessing your security posture, you can fortify the necessary policies and measures to expand your operations without growing pains.
• Increased ROI: A solid security posture requires investing in extensive protection measures, cybersecurity solutions, and other components. An assessment ensures your resources are focused on the most important security areas, especially those that boost sales outcomes, so that your investments generate the highest returns.

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How to assess your organization’s security posture

To analyze your current security posture, you need to perform a comprehensive security review that addresses all the policies, measures, and controls you currently have in place. To do so, you should take the following steps:

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Step 1: Inventory your IT assets

A complete inventory of IT assets is crucial for understanding your infrastructure and the components that require different levels of protection. List all your hardware, software, peripherals, and other devices so that you can examine them for security threats.

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Pay special attention to shadow IT—this includes software your employees use that your IT team is unaware of. Shadow IT can pose significant risks to your organization as the access levels and other security aspects of such tools are not mapped.

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You can uncover shadow IT by using dedicated software. Another best practice is to maintain an inventory for approved and documented software and monitoring for any additions not on the list. You can also introduce a policy regarding the transparent use of third-party software.

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Step 2: Review your vulnerabilities and attack surface

Vulnerabilities can come from various sources, such as:

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• Poor network configuration
• Lackluster antimalware software
• Insufficient access controls

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Perform ongoing reviews of your infrastructure for any threats that come from internal and external parties, after which you should consult with your team to outline and implement the corresponding security measures.

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Step 3: Document your data collection and processing practices

Map out how data is collected, processed, stored, and shared in your organization, accounting for potential exposure points and corresponding security measures. Make sure to also check for any applicable data protection standards like GDPR and CCPA.

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Step 4: Perform risk assessments

Even if your systems are fully protected, a third party that can access them might still put you at risk of incidents. The best practice is to inventory third parties, assess their security posture through regular risk assessments, and outline all security obligations and practices in your contracts.

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4 tips for improving your security posture

After examining your current security posture, you need to evaluate the criticality of various threats and vulnerabilities. From there, you’ll set a plan to remediate them through firmer policies, enhanced cybersecurity measures, and other long-term security initiatives.

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While this process will be different for every organization depending on its current security posture, you can follow these best practices:

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1. Create a cybersecurity framework (or adopt an established one): Frameworks standardize your policies and procedures to give you a roadmap for stronger cybersecurity. You can either build a framework from scratch or adopt an established one to ensure industry-standard practices.
2. Automate security reviews: Security reviews involve extensive evidence collection, which can be time-consuming and waste considerable resources if done manually. A better alternative is to adopt a software solution that lets you automate the process and free up your team’s time for other demanding tasks.
3. Develop and enforce security policies: Security policies define the processes and procedures you’ll implement to achieve and maintain a high level of security. Make sure your entire organization is familiar with the policies and follow standardized security practices.
4. Ensure organization-wide security awareness: Besides communicating your policies to everyone in your organization, you should keep them updated on the latest security threats and best practices. This is best achieved through regular training, which should be conducted at least annually.

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The importance of ongoing security posture monitoring

Your security posture changes all the time. Whenever you onboard a new vendor, purchase a device, or hire a new employee, the threat and risk landscape changes. This is why you should continuously monitor your security posture so you can maintain adequate practices and controls.

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Manual monitoring is ineffective here because you’re limited to point-in-time assessments. The good news is that there are various software solutions that enable ongoing monitoring, some of which are explained in the following table:

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Consider using an automation-enabled trust management platform like Vanta to monitor your security posture with minimal manual work.

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Assess and improve your security posture with Vanta

Vanta is a comprehensive trust management platform that streamlines security assessments to help you understand, improve, and demonstrate your security posture. It comes with automation capabilities and industry-leading integrations that simplify everything from security assessments and vendor security reviews to compliance audits.

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You can showcase your security posture to stakeholders without extensive back and forth by leveraging Vanta’s Trust Center. Powered by the platform’s continuous monitoring capabilities, it lets you track security controls in real time and communicate their effectiveness via a secure portal. Vanta customers experience:

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• 87 percent of security reviews deflected with a Trust Center
• 93 percent of access approvals automated
• 86 percent of NDA (non-disclosure agreement) collection automated

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If you want to learn more about Trust Center and the many ways it streamlines your security workflows, watch this short webinar.

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Vanta also offers a Questionnaire Automation product that lets you complete security questionnaires like SIG and CAIQ quickly and effortlessly. Some of the product’s key features include:

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• Centralized security knowledge base
• Up to 5x faster security review completion
• 73 percent coverage across security questions  
• 95 percent acceptance rate of AI-generated answers
• Multi-format questionnaire completion

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Visit the Questionnaire Automation product page to learn more or request a custom demo for your team today.

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