Cybersecurity teams face complex challenges when budgeting talent and solutions to meet their organizations’ expectations of cyber risk mitigation. Separating the signal from the noise to properly evaluate the cyber risk facing your organization is a challenge leaders like you know all too well. How can you establish good relationships and foster meaningful conversations with regulators and the board room in this complex space?
Given that there are countless sources to draw from and the risk assessment process is complex, the best way is to be data-driven and use tools that automate the measurement, quantification, and remediation of cybersecurity risk. You need to spend time communicating, analyzing, and strategizing; not building dashboards and powerpoint presentations.
With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, new insights can be extracted from the data generated in your environment giving you a trusted way to benchmark risk—and the potential financial impact of material incidents.
I recently had a chance to see Zscaler Risk360 in action and I see a lot of upside in how AI can work wonders as it processes data from sources like CrowdStrike and your Zscaler environment to generate a detailed profile of your risk posture and a basis for holistic cyber risk management.
The solution can help you understand your top cyber risk drivers, potential financial losses, mitigation details, and illustrate trend and peer comparisons. While its AI-powered cybersecurity maturity assessments can already be a game changer, I believe there’s even more potential of using AI to help with all of the capabilities available in Risk360 and newly acquired Avalor.
Here are some of my musings:
Quantification of risk
Risk360 ingests data from external sources and your own Zscaler environment to curate a detailed profile of your risk posture in real time. You can evaluate the efficacy of your cybersecurity controls across the four stages of attack: external attack surface, compromise, lateral propagation, and data loss, against all the entities in your environment, including assets, applications, workforce, and third parties.
Underneath the hood is a ThreatLabZ-powered risk framework backed by hundreds of signals and years of security research. It uses 100+ risk factors based on data from the Zscaler inline vantage point via ZIA and ZPA (in the future more Zscaler products) and from the external attack surface using third-party data sources. It quantifies each factor according to its risk weight, which then adds to your overall organization risk score and also maps these factors to various renowned risk and security frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and NIST CSF, etc.
Intuitive visualization and reporting
Being able to communicate cybersecurity risk in an intuitive way is a godsend when it comes time to engage senior leadership and corporate boards. You can investigate the top drivers of your organization’s cybersecurity risk, and even better can share financial loss estimates, including straightforward remediation recommendations. This feature includes Monte Carlo risk simulations that let you explore figures like expected losses and quantified security benefits.
You can even export a board-facing slide deck to facilitate communicating key risk findings and dollar-value estimates of financial exposure, saving you a lot of time while committing to consistent, repeatable reporting processes. Moreover, you can export a document with a sample format and content that can be a helpful starting point for security and legal teams in addressing the SEC's cyber risk reporting regulations. These resources can certainly get the attention of your board, executive leadership, and other stakeholders.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the AI-driven cybersecurity maturity assessment provides guidance to improve your zero trust journey and maturity. It is generated by a proprietary custom large language model (LLM).
Actionable remediation
Here’s where Risk360 really starts to show its value. It prioritizes risk remediation with policy action recommendations that are specific and impactful. You can drill in and investigate specific issues such as identifying specific users that are uploading sensitive data. Then, you can watch your risk score improve as you add policy actions over time.
I love the joke about how AI can take a single bullet point and turn it into a long elegant email that the AI on the other end can then summarize with a bullet — but wouldn’t you rather you used the AI to accomplish something impactful? With Risk360, you can gain valuable time back to spend on the real human value-add side of the equation and leave some of the busy work to your AI friends.
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