Reduce Complexity with K logix's Security Investment Assessment

Today, CISOs believe over 80% of their security investments are underutilized. They also believe many investments they have purchased do not correlate to specific security control areas and in some cases, they may be overspending.

Through trends such as the one above, K logix ingests this data to mold and mature the programs and services we offer to our clients. One of the top trending services K logix offers is our Security Investment Assessment (SIA) service.

The goal of our SIA service is to simplify your investments to mature your security program. CISOs are tasked with doing more with less and SIA provides the tools to achieve this. We help CISOs and security leaders improve and maximize the outputs of their investments while also reducing the number of security products required to protect their organizations.

THE CHALLENGE
Many solutions are purchased to solve a point problem, without considering the impact to operations, overall risk landscape, and total financial allocation. Many investments do not address the problem they were intended to solve.

With small teams, they may be overburdened managing too many security technologies. Many times, they lack a clear understanding of what products existed, who owned each product, if they were achieving their original purchase intention, and an overall handle on financial implications.

The key to improving security programs is to close the complexity gap by effectively managing the inherent complexity of technology investments and keeping pace with the environments in which they reside.

SECURITY INVESTMENT ASSESSMENT
We simplify investments to mature your security program. K logix’s SIA reviews your current technology investments through three lenses: Operational Maturity, Risk Mitigation, and Financial Cost.

OPERATIONAL MATURITY:
Through our in-depth analysis, we determine the operational maturity score of each of your security products. On average, most security products only score a 2.55 out of 5. After determining the scores of your products, we identify areas of improvement and actions required to increase their operational maturity. We take into account:

- The established outcome the investment was brought in to solve
- If feature sets are being maximized to keep pace with changes within the product and changes taking place within your business
- The product outputs and their ability to help you make decisions
- The standard operating procedures around the product – if the lead product stakeholder leaves, can someone take over without interruption?

Operational maturity helps you determine areas for improvement, actionable recommendations to increase the operational maturity score, and strong justifications for your decisions around investments.

RISK MITIGATION - CIS CONTROLS ALIGNMENT:
We correlate your security products to the twenty CIS Controls and score their alignment in keys areas ranging from ‘not aligned’ to ‘fully aligned’. We look at each investment and provide details on how well it meets the spirit of each of the twenty control areas. In our experience, only 22% of security programs are fully aligned in control areas 1-6, which are the six most important and critical areas.

When evaluating alignment with mitigating risk through the CIS Control areas, we consider:

- How well each investment identifies and mitigates risk
- Maturity alignment with CIS Controls

FINANCIAL COST:
By gaining a clear picture into where you are spending money, you are able to observe areas to divest or consolidate. On average, our SIA service is able to divert 20% of budget away for products that were redundant or non-performing into risk areas.

During the review of financial cost, we take into account:
- Understanding of over-or-under investments
- Justification for sun-setting investments
- Justification for future investment decisions

• Which products to consolidate and how to do it
• Which products to operationalize and how to do it
• Where products overlap so you may divest and save money
• Where gaps exist and recommended products to fill them