Today’s buyers are highly sensitive about data collection and security practices. As a result, a company that fails to secure its users’ data or misuses information is unlikely to remain in business for long.
On the other hand, security certifications go a long way toward building user trust and demonstrating a company’s commitment to taking data security seriously. ISO, for one, estimates that the companies they certify generally see up to 33% in annual revenue lift.
Depending on the frameworks you opt for, cyber GRC certifications can cover a wide range of requirements, and ensuring your company has everything in order can be challenging, especially given how many internal departments need to get involved. The huge amounts of documentation you need to review alone can be intimidating.
Here’s how you can uncover key cyber GRC blind spots that might otherwise jeopardize certification.
Verify Third Party Vendor Policies
Your partners and vendors operate outside your network’s boundaries but can have a huge impact on your data security. A vendor could introduce security flaws into your network that could jeopardize your users’ data.
Unfortunately, vendor security policies tend to be a blind spot, since companies cannot monitor or verify them all the time.
Review your vendors’ policies in critical areas like data access controls, incident response plans, and security certificate management. These areas tend to breed vulnerabilities, and checking whether your vendors use the right tools to mitigate risks is critical.
Ensure Network Diagrams Are up to Date
Network diagrams are a critical reference point in any security audit. Ideally, CISOs and compliance teams will ensure that their network diagrams always reflect the latest changes to the company’s architecture.
However, given the constantly changing nature of modern cloud infrastructure, diagrams tend to fall behind quickly.
Review your architecture and ensure your logical and physical diagrams reflect the state of your network. Review any silos for accuracy by confirming them with relevant company departments. Getting different departments to respond on time might be challenging, so make sure you gather documentation and conduct reviews well in advance of your certification timeline.
One easy way of speeding up this review is to use a cyber GRC automation tool like Cypago. This solution can integrate with your network infrastructure management platforms and remove the burden of constantly gathering information from different parts of your organization and reviewing it.
Review Risk Treatment Documentation
Security responses are a huge part of any certification process.
Given constant codebase changes and rapid release timelines, your company’s infrastructure map will change quickly. Modern companies use a mix of cloud and on-prem servers coupled with automated microservices, creating a sprawl that’s tough to manage.
Risk documentation is often a casualty of this sprawl, since security teams rush to keep pace with changes all the time, leaving little room to document rapid changes. Important risk mitigation documents like incident response procedures and access control policies become obsolete quickly.
Review these documents and match them to your existing assets. InfoBeyond’s Security Policy Tool can help you document and update security privileges and access control procedures, ensuring your policy remains up to date.
Verify the Contribution of SecOps to Secure Development
ISO certification places a good amount of weight on reviewing whether security operations contribute to secure code development. In most companies, security teams manage to mitigate threats but don’t always contribute to secure development.
For instance, security usually imposes itself at some point before code releases and acts as a hurdle. As a result, security turns into a barrier from a developer’s point of view. While your documentation might be up to scratch, it must demonstrate how your security policies secure your code.
Reviewing code bases for consistency is a good way to demonstrate this. Prioritize reviews of critical functionality and high-risk assets. Install policies that prioritize new code reviews since these are more likely to contain bugs.
Codacy Quality can help you maintain clean code and audit releases quickly. Also, check whether you have documented procedures that validate access controls post-release. Frequent code changes stress access control policies, and they become a blind spot quickly.
Ensure SOC Tool Logs Demonstrate Processing Integrity
SOC tools are an invaluable addition to any cybersecurity stack. However, for cyber GRC certification purposes, your SOC logs must demonstrate processing integrity. The key to proving this is offering context behind incident alerts.
Many organizations use a web of tools in silos with an SOC aggregating alerts for security to review. However, these tools often act merely as security log-gathering machines, failing to offer context to auditors. Make sure your SOC platform integrates with different parts of your infrastructure and check whether its alerts offer the right context.
Verifying the integrity of SOC alerts is another blind spot. Check whether threats classified as high and low fidelity are appropriate and that important stakeholders have full visibility into them.
Certification Boils Down to Preparation
Cyrber GRC certification is critical to building user trust. The best way to ensure your company experiences a smooth certification process is to prepare beforehand and gather all documentation in one place.
Review them carefully and check whether you’ve dealt with all the blind spots mentioned in this article.
