Strengthen Your Defenses: The Essential Steps for Conducting a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis

What is a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis?

A gap analysis is exactly that, an analysis of where you are now compared to where you should be. An information security gap analysis helps an organization understand their current state of cybersecurity readiness and what areas they need to improve to comply with industry specific requirements in order to ensure cybersecurity readiness.

Why is this Important for Public Safety & Critical Infrastructure Organizations?

A cybersecurity gap analysis is crucial for organizations to stay at the top of their game. This analysis helps identify vulnerabilities and weak points in your organization’s current cybersecurity posture. This includes gaps in policies, procedures, and technological defenses. By pinpointing these weak points your organization can better manage potential risks, enhance incident response capabilities, and support continuity of operations.

This is especially true for public safety organizations due to the critical nature and highly sensitive information handled. By identifying and addressing gaps in cybersecurity, public safety organizations can maintain operational continuity and focus on community safety.

How to Perform a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis?

Step 1: Choose a Specific Industry Framework to Compare Against

Start by selecting a recognized cybersecurity framework that is suitable for your industry. This will help you define and establish your baseline. Common frameworks include:

By leveraging appropriate frameworks as benchmarks for assessing cybersecurity efforts, agencies can identify gaps, ensure regulatory compliance, manage risks more effectively, and strengthen their overall security posture. This approach not only enhances preparedness for incident response but also promotes alignment with industry best practices, driving continuous improvement and enabling informed decision-making in cybersecurity.

Step 2: Data Collection

Gather the necessary data you will need to perform the analysis. This includes:

By gathering this data your agency can gain a thorough understanding of its cybersecurity posture, allowing for more effective analysis and identification of vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. The more data you can collect the more informed your analysis will be in the next step.

Step 3: Assessment of People and Processes

Evaluate the capabilities and awareness of your staff concerning cybersecurity practices. Consider their training, and responsibilities in maintaining security.

Review your current processes related to cybersecurity. These areas may include:

Identify areas where these processes may fall short of the standards set by your chosen framework.

By assessing staff capabilities and examining current cybersecurity processes, your agency can pinpoint weaknesses in training, network security, the integration of physical security, and incident response plans.

Step 4: Analysis

After the necessary data is collected, it is time to analyze the data and compare against your chosen framework. Look for gaps where your network’s security measures do not meet the framework requirements and policies.

For example, an agency might identify a gap in their incident response plan, where it lacks detailed procedures for incident detection and reporting. This would fail to meet the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0’s “Respond” function, which emphasizes timely detection, analysis, and mitigation of cybersecurity incidents. Other gaps might look like:

By identifying critical gaps in defense, this will allow for targeted improvements to strengthen your overall security and ensure compliance with best practices.

Step 5: Prioritization of Mitigations

After your gaps are identified, prioritize these gaps based on their potential impact on your network’s security. Critical systems should be addressed first. These are systems that, if compromised, have the most severe consequences for public safety and continuity of essential services.

Once prioritized you can then develop a remediation plan to address these gaps, which may include implementing new technologies, updating policies, or conducting additional staff training. You should also consider measures to ensure system redundancy, resilience, and rapid recovery, such as backup systems, failover mechanisms, and robust disaster recovery plans.

You may also consider other more proactive measures to help mitigate ongoing threats that are not apparent in the gap analysis. These might include recurring employee training programs, supplementing your existing IT/cybersecurity staff with in-house or external resources, or implementing advanced threat detection or attack surface management technologies like real-time monitoring.

By using this approach agencies can ensure that a plan is put in place to address the most severe threats first, reducing the likelihood of successful attacks and minimizing potential damage.

An Example of a Security Gap Analysis:

Current State vs. Framework Requirement: While conducting a cybersecurity gap analysis, you find that your cyber incident response plan has not been updated in years. Additionally, the plan has not been tested and your staff is unsure of their roles during a cyber incident. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework emphasizes the importance of a well-defined and regularly tested incident response plan to be prepared in the event of a cybersecurity attack.

Identified Gap: The lack of an up to date and tested incident response plan in addition to insufficient staff training. Potentially leaving your organization unprepared in the event of an attack, impeding your ability to help people that rely on your services.

Remediation Strategy: To be prepared you need to update the incident response plan, conduct regular tests and training exercises with staff, and establish a schedule for periodic reviews of the plan.