7 Things That Are Guaranteed to Waste Your Time During Security Assessments

Cybersecurity assessments and audits play a vital role in an organisation’s cyber resilience and help ensure that the security architecture and overall cybersecurity posture are effective in protecting the organisation against current threats. However, an undeniable side effect of security assessments and audits is the feeling of “time wastage.”

In this article, we’ll discuss actual causes for time wastage during security assessments and how organisations can reduce it, leaving more time for the team to improve its cyber resilience while bolstering a continuous compliance posture.

The Top 7 Time Wasters in a Security Assessment/Audit:

We’ve gone through countless security audits and assessments throughout our careers. Regardless of a company’s size, there are seven time-wasting factors that we see repeated every time a security assessment or audit is performed:

7. Evidence Gathering

Collecting evidence from multiple sources, tools, solutions, or personnel takes a lot of effort. Evidence material can be found in shared drives, a company’s intranet site, and more often than not in people’s mailboxes. But this is just the start: The person in charge of the assessment must then collate all this information and organise it in a way that can be made consumable by the auditors, which is the real time waster in this exercise.

How to reduce time wastage: Implement a centralised evidence repository where all relevant documents and materials are stored and easily accessible. This can significantly reduce the time spent gathering evidence and facilitate reuse for the next audit.

6. Lack of Ownership for Security Controls

“Who should I talk to about this?” is a common question during an engagement. One of the most painstaking exercises during an assessment is identifying who is accountable, and who’s responsible for a particular control or requirement. Often, after interviewing multiple stakeholders, it becomes clear that no one acknowledges responsibility—not out of unwillingness but due to unclear assignments—leading to inefficient security controls and potential weaknesses… And the same investigation usually has to be done once again upon a new audit, since this information is not centrally managed and tracked.

How to reduce time wastage: Clearly define and communicate ownership for each security control within the organisation, which can be better achieved by maintaining an updated RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix. Keep such information handy for the next time a cybersecurity assessment or audit is performed; this could save precious hours during your next review.

5. Excessive Number of Assessments Per Year

How many times have you wrapped up an audit, only to be told there’s another one coming up in three months, covering basically the same topics? We acknowledge cybersecurity is a continuous affair, and threats keep evolving, and it’s a well-accepted practice that every organisation must carry out multiple assessments annually to protect their information assets. However, unless the company can demonstrate continuous evolution, audits and assessments carried out shortly after each other might return essentially the same results, wasting your team’s time.

How to reduce time wastage: Develop a streamlined, continuous assessment process that allows for ongoing monitoring and evaluation, reducing the need for multiple disruptive audits, while enabling your team to celebrate the small victories and progress that compound over time.

4. “All Hands on Deck” Approach

“Team, we have a security assessment/audit coming up next week. I need you to drop everything you’re working on and focus on this for the next couple of weeks.” When the approach to security assessments and audits is reactive, regular reviews disrupt normal operations and lead to backlogs in other essential areas.

How to reduce time wastage: Adopt a proactive approach by ensuring the team documents their continuous progress and improvements to controls in a cybersecurity knowledge base until it becomes part of your regular workflows. Based on our observations, it’s much easier to regularly document piecemeal progress than it is to mobilise the team for weeks trying to dig out the latest info for each control and requirement.

3. Redoing All the Work from Scratch for a New Assessment

The board has recently been educated about the Essential 8 standard and wants the organisation to do an assessment against it. Although this shows increased maturity by the business, the cybersecurity or compliance team often needs to start the process from scratch, unable to leverage recently gathered information used for similar assessments.

How to reduce time wastage: Standardise assessment processes, map requirements across standards and reuse information and documentation from one another. This allows the team to build on previous work, saving time and effort.

2. An Increasing Pile of Reports and Findings to Manage

Once the security assessment is completed, the team responsible for it has another report to manage, usually copying and pasting the findings into a spreadsheet. This can lead to disconnected responses across similar findings, causing confusion and more time spent trying to make sense of it all.

How to reduce time wastage: Use automated tools and software to manage reports and findings. This can help keep track of remediation work and ensure consistent responses across similar issues.

1. THE BIGGEST TIME WASTER OF ALL: The Annual Cycle of Audits and Assessments

Once the assessment is over, findings are raised, and the team has a series of action items to add to their list. They then start working on the recommendations but usually have to wait a whole year for an auditor to review the work done. This creates a cycle where the company might have made significant progress but feels stagnant because auditors haven’t validated the evolution.

How to reduce time wastage: an approach we’ve seen working well to mitigate this issue is to have a retainer with a partner that can review your progress on an ongoing basis. This might be hard to achieve without a solution to manage such requests, but in the long run once it becomes second-nature to the team, such approach will enable your organisation to see the progress it makes in near real-time, boosting the team’s confidence and providing your board with immediate feedback on their ROI.

FINAL NOTES

We sincerely hope these tips help your organisation reduce time wastage during security assessments and audits. By implementing the strategies above, you can streamline your processes, improve efficiency, and focus more on continuous improvement and maintaining a robust cybersecurity posture.

However, if you’re looking for a comprehensive solution that addresses all these challenges in a user-friendly manner and at a very competitive cost, consider reaching out to us about our Cybereen platform. Cybereen offers an all-in-one solution designed to save time, enhance collaboration, and ensure continuous compliance, making your cybersecurity assessments and audits more effective and less time-consuming.