The Best Way to Protect Your Data: Continuous Security Validation

From small businesses to large businesses, most modern-day organizations that want to succeed should have an online presence to have a global reach. Companies that have an online presence or run primarily online are always open to cyberattacks. Such businesses’ data tends to be valuable to attackers and hackers in many ways.

To protect your business from attackers, you need to have a system that helps determine how you implement the basics of cyber security methods in your organization, either proactively or reactively. It’s very common for companies to go with the reactive path where they wait till something happens, like an attack or a data breach, and then take steps to fix it.

Unfortunately, this is a very common approach and sometimes seems to save costs for small businesses (if they don’t face any serious attacks). However, this is untrue as a single data breach or cyberattack could cost a lot for a company, especially small businesses. On average, there is an attempted cyberattack every 39 seconds, and the average costof a data breach is now over $3.9 million per breach.

These days, though, many people and businesses have security in mind before doing anything online. Not doing so would be bad for the business in the long run. Handling and dealing with cyberattacks or data breaches is a very tasking process that requires the expertise of professionals with years of experience in cybersecurity. This can become expensive for most businesses and would not be affordable. Small businesses that can't afford this might suffer from attacks and run out of business due to resulting losses.

Moreover, most companies are already compromised one way or the other without their knowledge. This can be very deadly, especially dealing with sensitive data.

As technology evolves, so do existing weaknesses, which can be discovered by malicious attackers. Every day, hackers and malicious actors are looking for loopholes in your system that can be used against your services.

Relying on manual security validation, which is a complex process that checks if the securities in place are working as expected, can be slow and expensive. Though, it gets the job done. With the rate of cyberattacks skyrocketing, this method is fast becoming obsolete and needs to be automated.

This is where continuous security validation comes in as it automates this whole process. It helps businesses decrease security risks through remote access networks, endpoint devices, and security lapses.

What Is Continuous Security Validation?

Before we go into the meaning of continuous security validation, we need to understand what the term security validation is.

In simple words, security validation is a cybersecurity method that provides companies with an extensive security report on what could happen if they suffer from a cyberattack. The tests involved in this method enable the company to determine if its current security is efficient and provide the company with relevant data in the case of a security breach.

With this, we can then say that continuous security validation is a recurring or persistent process that is carried out periodically and provides security reports about the company’s security status. With these run periodically, it is easier for companies to avoid cyberattacks and data breaches before they happen and also be assured that their system works as expected.

Data and cyber threats are highly disruptive concerns to any organization regardless of its size. Most companies usually leave themselves open by maintaining inadequate security measures.

Continuous security validation helps organizations gain the attacker's perspective of their security and analyze how resilient it is to attacks. While continuous security validation still uses some traditional validation methods, it focuses more on carrying out these methods in the way a real-life attacker would.

There are many industry best practices a business can leverage to implement continuous security validation. One of them is using a professional framework to help automate the process.

One of the services I recommend is Cymulate, which empowers security professionals and leaders to manage, know, and control their cybersecurity posture from end to end and provides various security solutions, including posture assessment and security validation.

Cymulate comes packaged with different professional tools that focus on helping organizations find loopholes in the various systems powering their business operations. Their detailed report, which collects information from various parts of an organization’s system, gives security experts and developers more insight into the current status of the security of their systems. It uses MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise for this.

Benefits of Continuous Security Validation

Continuous security validation has many benefits that help businesses secure their data and be less prone to attacks.

It basically helps increase a company’s cyber resiliency with continuous testing and validation. This helps test the effectiveness of security controls and tools in preventing specific attack vectors.

With continuous security validation, you can create an organizational cyber threat model to focus on higher risk areas and key information assets. This model methodically analyzes identified security observations, addresses challenges from frequent changes in the company, and provides useful metrics and methods to avoid interruption in business operations due to data breaches.

In the end, it's going to provide better defense against zero-day vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

Now, more than ever, organizations are running most of their business operations online and rely on adequate traditional security methods to protect them from cyberattacks. However, using those traditional methods is not enough.

Continuous security validation is necessary for organizations adopting technology and the internet to succeed and scale. It will protect their business operation data from attackers. The automated proactive approach of attacking constantly and using findings to optimize security makes enterprises safer for their customers.