When digital transformation projects are executed effectively, they enable you to drive your core business strategy forward. However, 45% of organisations claimed that their transformation projects had inherited legacy security issues that impacted their security posture in our recent survey. These issues, combined with the results of security assessments, can make it difficult to align security risk management with your organisation's priorities.
Often, these assessments uncover long lists of security improvements that need to be made, without any guidance on which improvements should be prioritised to have the most impact on your cyber resilience. In these circumstances, security risk management can become a blocker for business transformation if teams work through fixes without a clear roadmap.
To overcome this issue, risk owners should convert the results of an assessment to a structured Security Improvement Plan that prioritises remediations according to your short, medium, and long-term business strategy. With that in mind, here are three ways that you can use a Security Improvement Plan to prevent legacy issues from slowing down your transformation agenda.
Holding onto legacy infrastructure can become a blocker for business transformation if teams work through fixes without a clear roadmap.
1. Resolve critical issues before embarking on your transformation agenda.
Any Security Improvement Plan should be considered as a long-term roadmap to reduce your risk position. With cyber-attacks increasing over the last 12 months, it's important that your roadmap is flexible so that you can be agile enough to remediate critical security issues quickly, without jeopardizing imminent transformation projects.
By using a consistent measurement of risk, you can effectively prioritise vulnerabilities and create a backlog of critical fixes that need to be made. Then, external security partners can often remediate the vulnerabilities that are critical to your innovation agenda, working alongside your IT teams to enhance your immediate resilience against cyber threats while you focus on innovating at pace.
If there is a specific area of your transformation project that is of particular concern e.g. your Azure Active Directory configuration settings, then a "find and fix" discovery option can be implemented to quickly remediate security risks in that area.
You'll also be working with hybrid (Cloud and On-Prem) estates during your transformation project, so you should prioritise identity access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the quality of passwords across your organisation to reduce risk here, in addition to securing your cloud environments.
By prioritising security fixes in this way, you can also address the legacy issues that are slowing your digital transformation down. Common examples of these risks include:
- Unpatched apps and systems
- Systems that haven't been isolated from the internet or your network
- Supply chains that haven't been properly risk-assessed
2. Proactively accelerate key transformation priorities.
When the most critical issues have been addressed, a Security Improvement Plan gives you clarity, transparency, and focus to proactively improve your mid-term security. By triaging and categorising vulnerabilities according to their potential impact on the business, you can gain a holistic view of your risk profile against your strategy and risk appetite.
Armed with this information, you can prioritise and proactively address issues that might impede business progress more effectively. For example, if you've identified critical issues in your legacy systems and are introducing a transformation project that connects to those systems, you can prevent any delay to that project by directly addressing known issues, or provisioning supporting technology to enhance resilience.
As part of your Security Improvement Plan, you should also understand the cost, time, and resource required to remediate the key security risks that have been identified in your organisation. Again, this will give you a clearer picture of when you will need to scale up your resources to support the delivery of a transformation project, enabling you to proactively manage and mitigate risks before they result in a cyber incident. Having an upfront scope of the cost and effort required to reduce risk can also help you to build a business case for upgrades to your technology.
3. Embed a culture of security by design.
To build a secure platform for growth and enable transformation projects in the future, it's important that your Security Improvement Plan includes longer-term strategic decisions to improve your security posture over time. Often, this involves examining your people, processes, and technology to uncover the root causes of vulnerabilities that have already been remediated to stop them resurfacing in the future.
DevSecOps is an effective means of adopting a collaborative approach to executing security transformation across an organisation, so Security Improvement Plans should facilitate the adoption of these methods. By integrating cyber security into the development cycle of systems and applications from the beginning, and during the growth of enterprise estates through transformation projects, you can ensure that risk management is an enabler rather than a blocker.
See risk reduction in action.
Remediate is NCC Group's security improvement and remediation service. It helps security teams rapidly reduce their cyber risk by prioritising and fixing security weaknesses without impacting business as usual operations.
Remediation has already accelerated the transformation agendas of various businesses, including:
Charity
Following a major incident, we stood up a hybrid access method in less than two days, enabling the organisation to become operational.
Global Organisations
Working collaboratively, we removed attack vectors at pace to eradicate and lock threat actors out after a cyber-attack.
Public Sector
By rebuilding an Active Directory domain controller in less than 3 days following a ransomware attack, we helped the client reassert control and rebuild its systems.
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