How to Bolster Your Cloud Security Posture

How to bolster your security posture 

Four steps to protect your company from cybersecurity threats. 

As a  fast-growing software company, you need to focus on the biggest drivers of growth – your product and customer base. But you can't afford to neglect your cloud security posture, which can expose you to data breaches. Data breaches can damage your reputation, lose you customers, and lose you money. That can slow you down and threaten to ruin your success.

In this blog, I'll show you how you can improve your security posture and focus on those all-important growth tasks – without worrying about imminent security threats.

It all starts with regulatory compliance

For many software companies, ISO 27001 is the gold standard in data security. However, it comes with some challenges. You need to configure and prove that you're compliant in your cloud-based environments and internal business processes – which can be expensive. Some companies are so focused on their product, customers, and people that they neglect the security of their resources - and you can't protect what you don't know about. In both cases, where internal processes and procedures may still be developing, security posture is an excellent first line of defence.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud allows companies to enable ISO27001 regulatory policies to assess asset compliance against this standard. As you improve your Azure security, you also strengthen your ISO27001 compliance, showing your management team and customers that you are moving towards this goal.

A breakdown of security posture

Security posture refers to your overall status of cybersecurity readiness. It requires a thorough understanding of all the systems and processes you must protect to create a security roadmap and address potential gaps.

What it measures:

• How well you know and control your assets and attack surface
• How well you protect your business from cyber-attacks with security measures
• How well you detect and contain attaches and respond and recover from security events

Four steps for improving security posture 

1. Analyse your current security posture and see where you stand
2. Identify possible gaps and risks in your security
3. Take action to eliminate those gaps and reduce those risks
4. Repeat the process regularly to keep your security posture strong 

Your resources, people and tech stack are constantly changing. The key goal is to review the state of your security frequently, report on issues and fix them promptly to lower your risk level.

It's usually cheaper to prevent risk than to deal with an attack. You could lose a lot of customer data and, even worse, ruin your reputation.

Parallo Security Posture Reporting Service 

We created our Security Posture Reporting Service to help you have an ongoing process for reporting security issues, and we provide remediation recommendations to improve security and lower your risk.

Key metric: what's your Secure Score? 

Secure Score measures how secure your organisation is, with a higher number indicating more improvement actions taken. When used alongside Microsoft Defender for Cloud, it gives you an overview of your cybersecurity readiness, where the risks are and what you need to do to improve your score.

Most customers start with a Secure Score of around 20-30%. We expect their risk level to drop dramatically within three to six months and a Secure Score to improve to 80%+.

Once you reach that point, you can reduce your security posture reporting from monthly to bi-monthly or quarterly, with the peace of mind of knowing you have visibility and an ongoing assessment of security vulnerabilities.

Regular review and optimisation = strong security posture 

In our experience, customers willing to address security issues quickly get the best security posture results. You might not have the in-house expertise or available financial resources to constantly assess your security posture internally, and that's where the Parallo team can help. We can extract the information you need to create processes and plans to mitigate risks, so you can focus on what's important – your product.

If you're interested in learning more about our Security Posture Reporting service, please reach out to our team today.