PLANO, TX, Jan. 11, 2024 – Today, Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) cybersecurity solutions and pioneer of Managed Cyber Risk Reduction (MCRR), announced general availability of Critical Start Risk Assessments, which automatically aligns risk assessments to industry frameworks, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), benchmarks against peers, and stack-ranks recommendations for improvement. Critical Start Risk Assessments provide organizations with visibility and insight into their risk posture against similar organizations, with the ability to measure security maturity against expected levels and receive data-driven insights to prioritize next steps toward improved security.
According to Critical Start’s 2023 Cyber Risk Landscape Peer Report, 61% of security leaders are concerned about the misalignment between cybersecurity investments and their organization’s risk reduction priorities. These leaders know there must be a better way to derive insights from risk assessments to validate and prioritize investments for maximum impact. Most risk assessments are pen-and-paper or spreadsheet exercises that are prone to human error, omissions, and subjectivity. These assessments quickly result in data overwhelm with few, if any, deep insights delivered without significant time and expertise spent on analysis. Critical Start’s Risk Assessments go beyond solving those challenges to provide true alignment between risk reduction and cybersecurity investment.
“Critical Start Risk Assessments are based on proven, industry-standard frameworks and assessment results are quantifiably compared to a continuing set of peer benchmarks. This lets security leaders drive prioritized improvement decisions with evidence-based data. It’s a powerful data-driven decisioning they’ll gain, and one they’ve not had before, where they can justify budget requests and demonstrate quantifiable proof of the effectiveness of their security program investments,” said Chris Carlson, Chief Product Officer at Critical Start.
The key benefits of Critical Start Risk Assessments include:
- Easy-to-use web interface to execute and manage framework-based assessments, with no limits to the number of users or assessments that can be taken or re-taken.
- Ability to import existing assessments to gain greater insights and build upon previous work.
- Attach evidence of compliance or attainment to each assessment questionnaire.
- Visual tracking of security improvements over time.
- Industry peer benchmarking and security maturity comparison to more than 1,000 organizations across more than a dozen industries.
- Easy-to-follow, ranked, and justified recommendations for making immediate improvements.
- Continual reassessment to show progress and keep ahead of changing frameworks, standards, and peer organization advancements.
- Accelerated external audit readiness by comparing Critical Start assessment results against existing baselines.
- Track the lifecycle of each assessment including reviewers, approvers, due dates, and overdue status.
- Optional Professional Services to assist with the interviewing, evidence collection, data entry, analysis, reporting, and recommendations.
For more information on Critical Start Risk Assessments, visit: https://www.criticalstart.com/our-solutions/risk-assessments/
About Critical Start
Organizations today face the challenge of aligning their cyber protection measures with their risk appetite. CRITICALSTART®, a pioneer of the industry’s first Managed Cyber Risk Reduction solutions, provides holistic cyber risk monitoring via its Cyber Operations Risk & Response™ platform, paired with a human-led risk and security operations team, combined with over 8 years of award-winning Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. By continuously monitoring and mitigating cyber risks, Critical Start enables businesses to proactively protect their critical assets with a measurable ROI. The company’s platform provides maturity assessments, peer benchmarking, posture and event analytics, and response capabilities. Its risk and security operations team evaluates and actions threats, risks, vulnerabilities, and performs comprehensive threat intelligence research. Critical Start enables organizations to achieve the highest level of cyber risk reduction for every dollar invested, allowing them to confidently reach their desired levels of risk tolerance.
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