A key challenge for holding companies, multinational corporations and other conglomerates is monitoring the IT security risk of their subsidiaries.
Subsidiary IT environments contain assets and networks that you don’t manage but they can nevertheless put your organization at risk. In fact, unknown and unmanaged attacker- exposed assets in subsidiary environments can easily be the source of your organization’s most critical cybersecurity risk.
So, even if you lack chain-of-command authority over subsidiary IT, you still must ensure that your entire IT ecosystem is following security best practices in order to protect your organization’s data, business, brand and reputation.
And of course the challenges of monitoring and eliminating risks in your subsidiary environments increases with the number of subsidiaries you have. Many global companies have hundreds or even thousands of subsidiaries under their corporate umbrellas.
Making sure that your subsidiaries don’t increase your organization’s IT risk is a critical task. You need a solution that is an automated, continuous, and can assess, measure, remediate and monitor your subsidiary environments.
Whether your organization has one or 1,000 subsidiaries, as a security executive, you should ensure that your team is adopting these security risk management best practices:
Best Practice 01
Expose Subsidiary Risk
Every organization is subject to significant risk from unknown and unmanaged assets; our data shows that a full 25 to 75 percent of assets are unknown to organizations. This hidden risk is also known as shadow risk. Subsidiary environments are a significant source of shadow risk.
As a parent organization, you must ensure that your attack surface visibility fully embraces your subsidiary environments, even if they are not managed by the parent company’s security and IT teams. And not only is it important to identify subsidiary assets, it’s vital to understand how important each asset is to your business and to potential attackers to help you prioritize your response.
Best Practice 02
Measure Subsidiary Risk to Benchmark & Track Improvements
Building upon a strong foundation of discovering the attack surface of your subsidiaries and understanding the importance of each exposed asset, the next step is to objectively measure the security posture of each subsidiary. A baseline security score for each subsidiary, well-supported by details about how and why the score was assigned, provides you with objective content to use when you establish your top-level security program goals and approach each of the subsidiary teams who manage assets that are at risk.
Best Practice 03
Help Subsidiaries Eliminate Their Critical Risks
Unlike a third-party relationship, where you can walk away if a low security score is reported, your organization has a strong stake in making sure that your subsidiaries are quickly and efficiently resolving their security issues. Therefore, you need a method for:
Prioritizing the subsidiary risks that are identified: Security teams at subsidiaries simply don’t have the time to wade through a lengthy, unprioritized list of vulnerabilities that is not paired with knowledge of the criticality of the asset or its desirability to attackers.
Detailing and communicating the remediation steps needed to address each issue: Increase efficiency by providing your subsidiary teams with actionable guidance about where and how each issue should be addressed.
Benchmarking and tracking subsidiary progress over time:Create an efficient process for tracking and reporting subsidiaries’ security status.
Best Practice 04
Continuously Monitor Your Subsidiary Risk
You need a process for monitoring the always-changing security posture of each existing
subsidiary, as well as any newly acquired ones. You want to be able to monitor continuously, detecting new assets, misconfigurations or exposures that may occur.
In addition to identifying new issues, your process should help you validate which of the risks that you flagged for remediation have been resolved. A solution with automation and scalability makes it efficient for you to monitor your subsidiaries, even if you have a thousand.
In addition to identifying new issues, your process should help you validate which of the risks that you flagged for remediation have been resolved. A solution with automation and scalability makes it efficient for you to monitor your subsidiaries, even if you have a thousand.
How CyCognito Helps You Assess and Eliminate Your Subsidiary Risk
The CyCognito platform is an automated, continuous, SaaS product that helps you assess, measure, remediate and monitor your attacker-exposed subsidiary environments efficiently and effectively. It:
Discovers your subsidiaries automatically, needing only your parent company name to get started.
Identifies subsidiaries’ full attack surfaces, uncovering assets they didn’t know existed, and providing the business context of each asset to prioritize risks.
Objectively measures the risk of each subsidiary, as well as the risk of each asset in its environment.
Provides detailed, actionable remediation guidance for each issue.
Continuously monitors subsidiaries with an automated, scalable platform that needs no deployment or configuration.
Accelerate your risk remediation
Getting results without disrupting business is essential for CIOs. With the CyCognito platform, you can manage your risk confidently and intentionally to minimize your organization’s risk exposure. Learn about our revolutionary approach to external cyber risk management. Discover more about our solutions and how we help organizations identify, understand and master their risk in profound new ways.
Learn more about CyCognito and take the first step to Rule Your Risk.
