Critical events, whether they're network outages, data breaches, or natural disasters, demand rapid detection and a coordinated response to minimize disruptions. That's where a Critical Event Management system comes in. Once you have a CEM system in place, several best practices can guide you in its ongoing management. These include regular testing, staff training, ongoing assessment of plans and technologies, and monitoring of the associated costs and ROI. These processes aim to optimize system readiness and maintain your organization's security and resilience against threats.
Regular System Testing and Validation
To ensure that your Critical Event Management (CEM) system is robust and efficient, it's essential to continuously test and refine it. Different testing methods provide insights into varying aspects of the system, from its ability to handle cyber threats to its performance during peak loads. By applying these tests appropriately, you can ensure that both the technological and human elements of your CEM system are working effectively to protect your organization. Let's delve into the specifics of these tests. The right combination of them for your organization depends on its environment and specific goals.
Penetration Testing
Penetration testing involves simulating cyber-attacks or other malicious events to identify vulnerabilities before real attackers can exploit them. It is a proactive approach, and when done right, penetration testing takes into account the evolving threat landscape and throws the latest threats at your system to help keep it up to date. With the necessary level of cyber security expertise and the time required to test and evaluate the results, penetration testing can be done in-house. Otherwise, there are companies that provide pen-testing services.
Load Testing
Another common test is load testing, which involves simulating a high volume of system requests or accesses to evaluate the system's performance, stability, and responsiveness under peak load conditions. It helps find the load limits of a system during a surge and can point out hardware or software limitations that may need addressing.
Functional testing
Functional testing evaluates each function of the CEM system independently to make sure it operates as intended. It may include verifying that components such as user interfaces and log integrations are functioning correctly.
Failover Testing
If your CEM system includes high-availability functionality, failover and recovery testing will be high on your list for regular testing. This type of test entails simulating failures, such as system crashes, network outages, or hardware failures, to assess the efficiency and comprehensiveness of your CEM's recovery mechanisms.
Compliance Testing
Finally, compliance testing evaluates your CEM system against required industry standards and regulations. It may include verifying that the system meets specific security, privacy, and operational specifications, which can help avoid challenges during auditing.
Obviously, many of these tests will involve assessing the readiness, reaction, and decision-making prowess of your staff. It isn't enough to test the technical aspects of the system. You also need to confirm that the humans in the system are fulfilling their roles.
Of course, there is another aspect of ongoing CEM management that applies exclusively to your staff, and that is our next topic.
Ongoing Training and Awareness
Like every tool, the effectiveness of your CEM system is dependent on the competence and preparedness of the staff who operate it. As a result, regular employee training and awareness programs ensure they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to identify and respond to critical events appropriately.
Regular training sessions should be conducted to ensure that staff are updated about the latest threats, technologies, and best practices in the CEM realm. Training should also cover identifying critical events (especially the latest ones), assessing their potential impact, and recovering efficiently. These processes will necessitate a focus on and, perhaps, refresher sessions about the technical aspects of the CEM system.
Role-Specific
Of course, ongoing training should also be role-specific. The function of IT personnel during a critical event will be very different from that of staff in marketing or HR. Making sure that everybody involved knows what their tasks are is the cornerstone of successful ongoing CEM management.
Apart from formal training, awareness programs help ensure that staff are conscious of the importance of CEM and their roles in it. Awareness programs can include regular updates on new threats, reminders of best practices, and the sharing of lessons learned from past events that have taken place both within and outside the organization.
A well-trained workforce is crucial for the effectiveness of a CEM system. Regular drills, training sessions, and awareness programs will help create a staff that is confident when managing critical events, contributing to your organization's resilience and security.
Improving CEM Over Time
A static approach to Critical Event Management is not viable in the ever-evolving threat landscape we face. Just as threats evolve, your strategies and tools to address them also have to evolve. Continuously refining and improving your CEM program ensures that your organization remains resilient when encountering unforeseen events. The following three processes will help your CEM remain at the forefront of effectiveness.
Reviewing and Updating Your CEM Plan
An effective CEM plan is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. As your organization grows, its infrastructure changes, and as external factors like regulations, technologies, or threat vectors evolve, it's important to revisit and adjust your CEM plan. Regular reviews ensure that the plan aligns with your organization's current objectives and vulnerabilities. This should be done at least annually, or following significant organizational changes, and after any critical event, to incorporate lessons learned.
The specific steps involved will depend on the context of your review. For example, is it a regular, annual review, or a review necessitated by a recent event? Reviewing your CEM setup will often involve the same types of steps that were taken when first implementing it, such as assessing your organization's needs, doing an updated risk assessment, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and evaluating the effectiveness of your CEM technology. (See our article How to Implement CEM in Your Enterprise for more details.)
Identifying New Data Sources
CEM systems thrive on accurate and timely data. With the growth of IoT devices, cloud computing, and other digital platforms, there's a continuous influx of new potential data sources. Integrating these sources can provide richer context, faster threat detection, and more accurate event assessment. It's important to continuously update your inventory of potential data sources and ensure that the appropriate ones contribute to your CEM abilities and are reliably integrated into your CEM system.
Developing New Analytical Techniques
With the increase in data sources and volume comes the challenge of effectively analyzing it. Taking advantage of advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence can drastically improve the way your data is processed and interpreted. These analytical techniques can help predict potential threats, identify patterns, and automate responses. Regularly assessing and updating your analytical tools and techniques ensures that your CEM system remains at the cutting edge.
Balancing CEM Cost and Effectiveness
Balancing the cost and effectiveness of a Critical Event Management system is a fundamental consideration for any organization. As with many technological solutions, the most expensive CEM system isn't necessarily the most effective one for your organization. The challenge lies in optimizing the balance to achieve the best results without overspending. Let's look at two types of evaluations to undertake when looking to keep your system cost-effective: evaluating your CEM-related costs and measuring its ROI.
Evaluating the Costs of Your CEM Solution
It's important to keep tabs on the ongoing costs of your CEM solution. These include operational costs, such as licensing fees and updates from the vendor that are offered for a fee, as well as any maintenance costs. Training costs may be incurred when bringing staff up to speed on new features, processes, data sources, or threats. There can also be onboarding and training costs as staff turnover occurs. Additional costs might arise from false alarms or bugs that result in staff time devoted to support issues that are raised with the vendor.
Measuring the ROI of CEM
A CEM system, like many security system investments, is notoriously difficult to pin down when it comes to ROI. If it does its job, it's difficult, if not impossible, to assess what your losses might have been without it. Still, there are some concrete benefits that can be assessed to help determine the value of your CEM system.
Occasionally, there are direct cost savings that can be attributed to your CEM plan. Specific types of events, if not averted or contained, such as denial-of-service or ransomware attacks, could result in downtime, operational losses, and potentially, impact on revenue. While it may be difficult to pin it down to the dollar, estimating how such events would have impacted your organization financially is usually possible.
Another area of potential ROI from your CEM system is operational efficiency. Compared to not having CEM in place, the right system will streamline operations, reduce time spent on false alarms, and improve response times. All of these elements add up to time saved.
Finally, if your CEM has helped you avoid or minimize a situation in which your organization's reputation would have been damaged, by enabling you to respond quickly and effectively, the long-term financial benefits are likely incalculable but very real.
Summary
Your CEM journey doesn't end after implementation; it's a continuous process of evolution and adjusting course. Ongoing CEM management is essential for ensuring that your organization is prepared to respond to critical events effectively. By regularly testing and validating your CEM system, providing ongoing training to your staff, and improving your CEM over time, you can help protect your organization from the impact of critical events.
