Having a cybersecurity program without a dashboard is like driving a car without a dashboard. Yes, the car will work, but you have no idea what’s really going on or where you are going. Here we’ll look at 5 reasons your company should have a cybersecurity dashboard.
So why does a monitoring toolset and dashboard matter?
A dashboard system can provide early warnings, advanced insights, and actionable intelligence about what to do next with a company’s security plan.
Consider video cameras and motion sensors for physical security. They help assess activities inside and outside of buildings. Monitoring toolsets are no different; they check for activity on the network, intrusion attempts, compromised or changed sections of data, and more. They help warn about bad actors and attackers.
Dashboards, when designed properly, can act like a brilliant advisor or a trusted board member. They provide access to tremendous amounts of data and can provide a sense of objectivity by way of clear metrics. With that, leaders can better analyze and inquire, which helps drive innovation, and to be more assured in their decision-making.
Further, dashboards can shed a lot of light on a company’s security posture and the threats surrounding it. The sooner that a company can assess, update, and reform their monitoring and dashboard solutions, the better they can determine how best to stay safe in the future.
For cybersecurity, the right dashboard helps security teams, leadership, and other experts effectively evaluate an organization’s security needs, which ultimately helps them achieve their business goals.
Your dashboard should help you achieve the following 5 things:
1) Ensuring your security controls are working and up to date.
This seems obvious, but most companies that have security programs don’t know if they are truly covered by their security controls, aren’t sure if their security controls are up-to-date, and don’t know if they are working. An effective cybersecurity dashboard gives you this information in real time. It’s an essential part of all cybersecurity programs.
2) Evaluate and verify the risk profile of the business.
Effective risk monitoring lets leadership understand how many assets are under threat and what kind of losses or harm they could suffer if successfully attacked.
3) Manage the budget for technology, support systems, and security systems.
Given a well-tuned risk profile, investments in security systems can be realigned to match the amount of value a threatened asset brings to a company (and what its loss might do to harm a company). This is a critically helpful insight when making budgeting decisions.
4) Enable and then monitor the efficacy of a company’s internal growth plan.
Every access point, device, and log-in event represents activity made by people. Monitoring these activities can highlight when staff use their devices, for how often, and what data they rely on. This information can help determine where to hire more people for better productivity as much as assess the possibility of a threat.
5) Reveal places where higher R.O.I. can be found and quickly achieved.
We have specifically built tools and applications to find opportunities for R.O.I., so this subject is very important to us. Security monitoring can in fact help identify business opportunities.
For example, a security monitoring tool identifies devices that are used most often, or databases that are regularly accessed. This information can help determine whether the company can reallocate budget and device support to other sections of the company, which can reduce wasted time and effort, thereby raising profit margins.
Cybersecurity dashboards are a key component to every cybersecurity program and is a key pillar in our Cybersecurity Risk Minimization Method. Without the insights they provide it’s like driving blind.
Getting the right dashboard in place is not a huge undertaking but takes care in ensuring you are seeing the data that is meaningful to your company and security protocols.
If you’d like to learn more about how a dashboard can help you, set up a brief call with us here.
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