A cybersecurity maturity assessment evaluates an organization’s security program against the NIST CSF framework to identify and prioritize weak or missing controls, helping to reduce security and compliance risks.

The cybersecurity maturity assessment is designed to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s security program through a review of its current set of controls and uses a prioritized approach to identify weak or missing controls that could increase the security or compliance risk. This assessment is a critical benchmarking tool in the development of a comprehensive security program and for determining readiness for future assessments and audits. The process involves interviewing key individuals within the organization. We use the NIST CSF, which consists of standards, guidelines and leading practices to manage cybersecurity-related risks, threats to and vulnerabilities present in the environment. This framework provides a prioritized and flexible approach to promote the protection of the organization’s systems, infrastructure and operations.

As such, the assessment will measure your environment’s ability to identify, protect, detect, respond to and recover from a cyber-event, which are the key functions of the NIST CSF. The goals of this assessment are as follows:

• Provide an independent verification and ensure that the security program meets company requirements.
• Provide a method for measuring the current state of the organization’s information security program and determining whether that state has changed from previous assessments.
• Adopt best practices by conforming to legal and industry regulations.
• Help build maturity through both tactical and strategic plans that identify immediate countermeasures and impact points.

We will conduct a design-level assessment of the current implementation of the technology, architecture and processes used for enterprise security execution and management against the NIST CSF cybersecurity requirements. We interview stakeholders, process owners and functional staff members. Tasks will include the following:

• Interview IT personnel to understand the current controls or governance framework(s) in place to align with industry practices or regulatory requirements.
• Review and compare strategic security goals and security operations.
• Conduct interviews with key personnel across departments and groups, including IT security and IT operations staff members.
• Review high-level inventories of systems, applications, networks and configuration standards.