Cyber security has evolved to become more than a compliance-driven mandate. Today’s CEOs, boards of directors, and shareholders are demanding an understanding from IT leadership of the value security delivers to the business, which means that CIOs and CISOs need empiric evidence that demonstrates security controls are working as intended. In a nutshell, they need security validation to prove security effectiveness.

As shared in our white paper, Security Validation for Security Effectiveness: Five Critical Steps to Prove the Return on Security Investments, security validation can help organizations meet critical business mandates and prove value to the C-Suite. Organizations that embrace and adopt the needed validation capabilities will be better able to defend against the rising tide of ransomware, data breaches, and other forms of malicious threats while they sustain, or even improve, operational performance and rationalize investments.

For instance, did you know that:

• 53% of organizations are unaware that an attack is active in their environment
• More than 67% of attacks executed are not prevented
• Roughly 74% of the attacks tested in production environments go undetected
• Only 9% of attacks detected are correlated by SIEMs and generate an alert

These findings, reported in the Mandiant Security Effectiveness Report 2020, were uncovered during testing by the Mandiant Security Validation Platform in enterprise production environments and compiled by the Mandiant Solutions research team. Without a doubt, there is a clear need for organizations to improve security effectiveness. When approached the right way, security validation can help IT leadership answer critical questions such as:

• What is the risk of targeted threats to our company, and how does that impact operations?
• How can we optimize cyber defenses while justifying our security investments?
• What proactive steps should we take to understand the impact of the removal of a technology or change in our security infrastructure?
• How does the security team prove its value and instill confidence across the company?

When IT leadership can answer these questions with empiric evidence, they gain a solid understanding of the impact security effectiveness has on areas such as business continuity, asset protection, regulatory and compliance requirements, and spend justification.

As detailed in our white paper, five critical steps are required to continuously validate security effectiveness and attain the evidence needed to report with confidence to business leadership. The five steps are:

• Prioritize what you are going to measure based on relevant and timely cyber threat intelligence
• Measure where you are today
• Optimize your environment as informed by the identified gaps
• Rationalize your portfolio and processes to eliminate redundancies
• Monitor your environment continuously against a known good baseline

Want to learn more about how security validation can reduce risk, prove effectiveness and improve ROI? Download our white paper, Security Validation for Security Effectiveness: Five Critical Steps to Prove the Return on Security Investments.