Corporate board leadership: Core principles in developing talent

Do you know what would happen to your company if your CEO suddenly had to resign immediately for personal reasons? Or got seriously ill? Or worse, died? These scenarios, while rare, do happen, and many companies are not prepared. In fact, 45% of US companies do not have a contingency plan for CEO succession, according to a 2020 Harvard Business Review study.  

Do you have a plan for CEO succession? As a business owner, you may have an exit strategy in place for your company, but do you have a plan to bridge the leadership gap for you and each member of your leadership team? Does the plan include the kind of crises listed above? What would you do if your next-in-line left suddenly? 

Whether yours is a family-owned business, a company of equity partners, or a private company with a governing body, here are things to consider when you’re faced with a situation where your CEO has abruptly departed or has decided to step down.  

1. Get a plan in place. First, assess the situation and figure out your priorities. If there is already a plan for these types of circumstances, evaluate how much of it is applicable to this particular circumstance. For example, if the plan is for the stepping down or announced retirement of your CEO, but some other catastrophic event occurs, you may need to adjust key components and focus on immediate messaging rather than future positioning. If there is no plan, assign a small team to create one immediately. 

Make sure management, team leaders, and employees are aware and informed of your progress; this will help keep you organized and streamline communications. Management needs to take the lead and select a point person to document the process. Management also needs to take the lead in demeanor. Model your actions so employees can see the situation is being handled with care. Once a strategy is identified based on your priorities, draft a plan that includes what happens now, in the immediate future, and beyond. Include timetables so people know when decisions will be made.  

2. Communicate clearly, and often. In times of uncertainty, your employees will need as much specific information as you can give them. Knowing when they will hear from you, even if it is “we have nothing new to report” builds trust and keeps them vested and involved. By letting them know what your plan is, when they’ll receive another update, what to tell clients, and even what specifics you can give them (e.g., who will take over which CEO responsibility and for how long), you make them feel that they are important stakeholders, and not just bystanders. Stakeholders are more likely to be strong supporters during and after any transition that needs to take place. 

3. Pull in professional help. Depending on your resources, we recommend bringing in a professional to help you handle the situation at hand. At the very least, call in an objective opinion. You’ll need someone who can help you make decisions when emotions are running high. Bringing someone on board that can help you decipher what you have to work with and what your legal and other obligations may be, help rally your team, deal with the media, and manage emotions can be invaluable during a challenging time. Even if it’s temporary. 

4. Develop a timeline. Figure out how much time you have for the transition. For example, if your CEO is ill and will be stepping down in six months, you have time to update any existing exit strategy or succession plan you have in place. Things to include in the timeline: 

• Who is taking over what responsibilities? 
• How and what will be communicated to your company and stakeholders? 
• How and what will be communicated to the market? 
• How will you bring in the CEO's replacement, while helping the current CEO transition out of the organization? 

If you are in a crisis situation (e.g., your CEO has been suddenly forced out or asked to leave without a public explanation), you won’t have the luxury of time.  

Find out what other arrangements have been made in the past and update them as needed. Work with your PR firm to help with your change management and do the right things for all involved to salvage the company’s reputation. When handled correctly, crises don’t have to have a lasting negative impact on your business.   

5. Manage change effectively. When you’re under the gun to quickly make significant changes at the top, you need to understand how the changes may affect various parts of your company. While instinct may tell you to focus externally, don’t neglect your employees. Be as transparent as you possibly can be, present an action plan, ask for support, and get them involved in keeping the environment positive. Whether you bring in professionals or not, make sure you allow for questions, feedback, and even discord if challenging information is being revealed.  

6. Handle the media. Crisis rule #1 is making it clear who can, and who cannot, speak to the media. Assign a point person for all external inquiries and instruct employees to refer all reporter requests for comment to that point person. You absolutely do not want employees leaking sensitive information to the media. 
 
With your employees on board with the change management action plan, you can now focus on external communications and how you will present what is happening to the media. This is not completely under your control. Technology and social media changed the game in terms of speed and access to information to the public and transparency when it comes to corporate leadership. Present a message to the media quickly that coincides with your values as a company. If you are dealing with a scandal where public trust is involved and your CEO is stepping down, handling this effectively will take tact and most likely a team of professionals to help. 

Exit strategies are planning tools. Uncontrollable events occur and we don’t always get to follow our plan as we would have liked. Your organization can still be prepared and know what to do in an emergency situation or sudden crisis.  Executives move out of their roles every day, but how companies respond to these changes is reflective of the strategy in place to handle unexpected situations. Be as prepared as possible. Own your challenges. Stay accountable. 

BerryDunn can help whether you need extra assistance in your office during peak times or interim leadership support during periods of transition. We offer the expertise of a fully staffed accounting department for short-term assignments or long-term engagements―so you can focus on your business. Meet our interim assistance experts.

Just as sports teams need to bring in outside resources — a new starting pitcher, for example, or a free agent QB — in order to get better and win more games, most organizations need to bring in outside resources to win the cybersecurity game. Chapter 4 in our Cybersecurity Playbook for Management looks at how managers can best identify and leverage these outside resources, known as external capacity.

In your last blog, you mentioned that external capacity refers to outside resources — people, processes, and tools — you hire or purchase to improve maturity. So let’s start with people. What advice would you give managers for hiring new staff?
RG: I would tell them to search for new staff within their communities of interest. For instance, if you’re in financial services, use the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) as a resource. If you’re in government, look to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). Perhaps more importantly, I would tell managers what NOT to do.

First, don’t get caught up in the certification trap. There are a lot of people out there who are highly qualified on paper, but who don’t have a lot of the real-world experience. Make sure you find people with relevant experience.

Second, don’t blindly hire fresh talent. If you need to hire a security strategist, don’t hire someone right out of college just getting started. While they might know security theories, they’re not going to know much about business realities.

Third, vet your prospective hires. Run national background checks on them, and contact their references. While there is a natural tendency to trust people, especially cybersecurity professionals, you need to be smart, as there are lots of horror stories out there. I once worked for a bank in Europe that had hired new security and IT staff. The bank noticed a pattern: these workers would work for six or seven months, and then just disappear. Eventually, it became clear that this was an act of espionage. The bank was ripe for acquisition, and a second bank used these workers to gather intelligence so it could make a takeover attempt. Every organization needs to be extremely cautious.

Finally, don’t try to hire catchall staff. People in management often think: “I want someone to come in and rewrite all of our security policies and procedures, and oversee strategic planning, and I also want them to work on the firewall.” It doesn’t work that way. A security strategist is very different from a firewall technician — and come with two completely different areas of focus. Security strategists focus on the high-level relationship between business processes and outside threats, not technical operations. Another point to consider: if you really need someone to work on your firewall, look at your internal capacity first. You probably already have staff who can handle that. Save your budget for other resources.

You have previously touched upon the idea that security and IT are two separate areas.
RG: Yes. And managers need to understand that. Ideally, an organization should have a Security Department and an IT Department. Obviously, IT and Security work hand-in-glove, but there is a natural friction between the two, and that is for good reason. IT is focused on running operations, while security is focused on protecting them. Sometimes, protection mechanisms can disrupt operations or impede access to critical resources.

For example, two-factor authentication slows down the time to access data. This friction often upsets both end users and IT staff alike; people want to work unimpeded, so a balance has to be struck between resource availability and safeguarding the system itself. Simply put, IT sometimes cares less about security and more about keeping end users happy — and while that it is important, security is equally important.

What’s your view on hiring consultants instead of staff?
RG: There are plenty of good security consultants out there. Just be smart. Vet them. Again, run national background checks, and contact their references. Confirm the consultant is bonded and insured. And don’t give them the keys to the kingdom. Be judicious when providing them with administrative passwords, and distinguish them in the network so you can keep an eye on their activity. Tell the consultant that everything they do has to be auditable. Unfortunately, there are consultants who will set up shop and pursue malicious activities. It happens — particularly when organizations hire consultants through a third-party hiring agency. Sometimes, these agencies don’t conduct background checks on consultants, and instead expect the client to.

The consultant also needs to understand your business, and you need to know what to expect for your money. Let’s say you want to hire a consultant to implement a new firewall. Firewalls are expensive and challenging to implement. Will the consultant simply implement the firewall and walk away? Or will the consultant not only implement the firewall, but also teach and train your team in using and modify the firewall? You need to know this up front. Ask questions and agree, in writing, the scope of the engagement — before the engagement begins.

What should managers be aware of when they hire consultants to implement new processes?
RG: Make sure that the consultant understands the perspectives of IT, security, and management, because the end result of a new process is always a business result, and new processes have to make financial sense.

Managers need to leverage the expertise of consultants to help make process decisions. I’ll give you an example. In striving to improve their cybersecurity maturity, many organizations adopt a cybersecurity risk register, which is a document used to list the organization’s cybersecurity risks, record actions required to mitigate those risks, and identify who “owns” the risk. However, organizations usually don’t know best practices for using a risk register. This sort of tool can easily become complex and unruly, and people lose interest when extracting data from a register becomes difficult or consumes a lot of time reading.

A consultant can help train staff in processes that maximize a risk register’s utility. Furthermore, there’s often debate about who owns certain risks. A consultant can objectively arbitrate who owns each risk. They can identify who needs to do X, and who needs to do Y, ultimately saving time, improving staff efficiency, and greatly improving your chances of project success.

Your mention of a cybersecurity risk register naturally leads us to the topic of tools. What should managers know about purchasing or implementing new technology?
RG: As I mentioned in the last blog, organizations often buy tools, yet rarely maximize their potential. So before managers give the green light to purchase new tools, they should consider ways of leveraging existing tools to perform more, and more effective, processes.

If a manager does purchase a new tool, they should purchase one that is easy to use. Long learning curves can be problematic, especially for smaller organizations. I recommend managers seek out tools that automate cybersecurity processes, making the processes more efficient.

For example, you may want to consider tools that perform continuous vulnerability scans or that automatically analyze data logs for anomalies. These tools may look expensive at first glance, but you have to consider how much it would cost to hire multiple staff members to look for vulnerabilities or anomalies.

And, of course, managers should make sure that a new tool will truly improve their organization’s safeguards against cyber-attack. Ask yourself and your staff: Will this tool really reduce our risk?

Finally, managers need to consider eliminating tools that aren’t working or being used. I once worked with an organization that had expensive cybersecurity tools that simply didn’t function well. When I asked why it kept them, I was told that the person responsible for them was afraid that a breach would occur if they were removed. Meanwhile, these tools were costing the organization around $60,000 a month. That’s real money. The lesson: let business goals, and not fear, dictate your technology decisions.

So, what’s next?
RG: So far in this series we have covered the concepts of maturity and capacity. Next, we’re going to look at the concept of discovery. Chapter 5 will focus on internal audit strategies that you can use to determine, or discover, whether or not your organization is using tools and processes effectively.

Read Discovery: Cybersecurity playbook for management #5 now.

It may be hard to believe some seasons, but every professional sports team currently has the necessary resources — talent, plays, and equipment — to win. The challenge is to identify and leverage them for maximum benefit. And every organization has the necessary resources to improve its cybersecurity. Chapter 3 in BerryDunn’s Cybersecurity Playbook for Management looks at how managers can best identify and leverage these resources, known collectively as internal capacity.

The previous two chapters focused on using maturity models to improve an organization’s cybersecurity. The next two are about capacity. What is the difference, and connection, between maturity and capacity, and why is it important? 
RG: Maturity refers to the “as is” state of an organization’s cybersecurity program compared to its desired “to be” state. Capacity refers to the resources an organization can use to reach the “to be” state. There are two categories of capacity: external and internal. External capacity refers to outside resources — people, processes, and tools — you can hire or purchase to improve maturity. (We’ll discuss external capacity more in our next installment.) Internal capacity refers to in-house people, processes, and tools you can leverage to improve maturity. 

Managers often have an unclear picture of how to use resources to improve cybersecurity. This is mainly because of the many demands found in today's business environments. I recommend managers conduct internal capacity planning. In other words, they need to assess the internal capacity needed to increase cybersecurity maturity. Internal capacity planning can answer three important questions:

1. What are the capabilities of our people?
2. What processes do we need to improve?
3. What tools do we have that can help improve processes and strengthen staff capability?

What does the internal capacity planning process look like?
RG: Internal capacity planning is pretty easy to conduct, but there’s no standard model. It’s not a noun, like a formal report. It’s a verb — an act of reflection. It’s a subjective assessment of your team members’ abilities and their capacity to perform a set of required tasks to mature the cybersecurity program. These are not easy questions to ask, and the answers can be equally difficult to obtain. This is why you should be honest in your assessment and urge your people to be honest with themselves as well. Without this candor, your organization will spin its wheels reaching its desired “to be” state.

Let’s start with the “people” part of internal capacity. How can managers assess staff?RG: It’s all about communication. Talk to your staff, listen to them, and get a sense of who has the ability and desire for improving cybersecurity maturity in certain subject areas or domains, like Risk Management or Event and Incident Response. If you work at a small organization,  start by talking to your IT manager or director. This person may not have a lot of cybersecurity experience, but he or she will have a lot of operational risk experience. IT managers and directors tend to gravitate toward security because it’s a part of their overall responsibilities. It also ensures they have a voice in the maturing process.

In the end, you need to match staff expertise and skillsets to the maturity subject areas or domains you want to improve. While an effective manager already has a sense of staff expertise and skillsets, you can add a SWOT analysis to clarify staff strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The good news: In my experience, most organizations have staff who will take to new maturity tasks pretty quickly, so you don’t need to hire a bunch of new people.

What’s the best way to assess processes?
RG: Again, it’s all about communication. Talk to the people currently performing the processes, listen to them, and confirm they are giving you honest feedback. You can have all the talent in the world, and all the tools in the world — but if your processes are terrible, your talent and tools won’t connect. I’ve seen organizations with millions of dollars’ worth of tools without the right people to use the tools, and vice versa. In both situations, processes suffer. They are the connective tissue between people and tools. And keep in mind, even if your current ones are good, most  tend to grow stale. Once you assess, you probably need to develop some new processes or improve the ones in place.

How should managers and staff develop new processes?
RG: Developing new ones can be difficult — we’re talking change, right? As a manager, you have to make sure the staff tasked with developing them are savvy enough to make sure the processes improve your organization’s maturity. Just developing a new one, with little or no connection to maturity, is a waste of time and money. Just because measuring maturity is iterative, doesn’t mean your approach to maturing cybersecurity has to be. You need to take a holistic approach across a wide range of cybersecurity domains or subject areas. Avoid any quick, one-and-done processes. New ones should be functional, repeatable, and sustainable; if not, you’ll overburden your team. And remember, it takes time to develop new ones. If you have an IT staff that’s already struggling to keep up with their operational responsibilities, and you ask them to develop a new process, you’re going to get a lot of pushback. You and the IT staff may need to get creative — or look toward outside resources, which we’ll discuss in chapter 4.

What’s the best way to assess tools?
RG: Many organizations buy many tools, rarely maximize their potential. And on occasion, organizations buy tools but never install them. The best way to assess tools is to select staff to first measure the organization’s inventory of tools, and then analyze them to see how they can help improve maturity for a certain domain or subject area. Ask questions: Are we really getting the maximum outputs those tools offer? Are they being used as intended?

I’ll give you an example. There’s a company called SolarWinds that creates excellent IT management tools. I have found many organizations use SolarWinds tools in very specific, but narrow, ways. If your organization has SolarWinds tools, I suggest reaching out to your IT staff to see if the organization is leveraging the tools to the greatest extent possible. SolarWinds can do so much that many organizations rarely leverage all its valuable feature.

What are some pitfalls to avoid when conducting internal capacity planning?
RG: Don’t assign maturity tasks to people who have been with the organization for a really long time and are very set in their ways, because they may be reluctant to change. As improving maturity is a disruptive process, you want to assign tasks to staff eager to implement change. If you are delegating the supervision of the maturity project, don’t delegate it to a technology-oriented person. Instead, use a business-oriented person. This person doesn’t need to know a lot about cybersecurity — but they need to know, from a business perspective, why you need to implement the changes. Otherwise, your changes will be more technical in nature than strategic. Finally, don’t delegate the project to someone who is already fully engaged on other projects. You want to make sure this person has time to supervise the project.

Is there ever a danger of receiving incorrect information about resource capacity?
RG: Yes, but you’ll know really quickly if a certain resource doesn’t help improve your maturity. It will be obvious, especially when you run the maturity model again. Additionally, there is a danger of staff advocating for the purchase of expensive tools your organization may not really need to manage the maturity process. Managers should insist that staff strongly and clearly make the case for such tools, illustrating how they will close specific maturity gaps.

When purchasing tools a good rule of thumb is: are you going to get three times the return on investment? Will it decrease cost or time by three times, or quantifiably reduce risk by three times? This ties in to the larger idea that cybersecurity is ultimately a function of business, not a function of IT. It also conveniently ties in with external capacity, the topic for chapter four.

Read our next cybersecurity playbook article, External capacity: Cybersecurity playbook for management #4, here.

It’s one thing for coaching staff to see the need for a new quarterback or pitcher. Selecting and onboarding this talent is a whole new ballgame. Various questions have to be answered before moving forward: How much can we afford? Are they a right fit for the team and its playing style? Do the owners approve?

Management has to answer similar questions when selecting and implementing a cybersecurity maturity model, and form the basis of this blog – chapter 2 in BerryDunn’s Cybersecurity Playbook for Management.

What are the main factors a manager should consider when selecting a maturity model?
RG: All stakeholders, including managment, should be able to easily understand the model. It should be affordable for your organization to implement, and its outcomes achievable. It has to be flexible. And it has to match your industry. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have an IT-centric maturity model if you’re not an extremely high-tech organization. What are you and your organization trying to accomplish by implementing maturity modeling? If you are trying to improve the confidentiality of data in your organization’s systems, then the maturity model you select should have a data confidentiality domain or subject area.

Managers should reach out to their peer groups to see which maturity models industry partners and associates use successfully. For example, Municipality A might look at what Municipality B is doing, and think: “How is Municipality B effectively managing cybersecurity for less money than we are?” Hint: there’s a good chance they’re using an effective maturity model. Therefore, Municipality A should probably select and implement that model. But you also have to be realistic, and know certain other factors—such as location and the ability to acquire talent—play a role in effective and affordable cybersecurity. If you’re a small town, you can’t compare yourself to a state capital.

There’s also the option of simply using the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2), correct?
RG: Right. C2M2, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy, is easily scalable and can be tailored to meet specific needs. It also has a Risk Management domain to help ensure that an organization’s cybersecurity strategy supports its enterprise risk management strategy.

Once a manager has identified a maturity model that best fits their business or organization, how do they implement it?
RG: STEP ONE: get executive-level buy-in. It’s critical that executive management understands why maturity modeling is crucial to an organization's security. Explain to them how maturity modeling will help ensure the organization is spending money correctly and appropriately on cybersecurity. By sponsoring the effort, providing adequate resources, and accepting the final results, executive management plays a critical role in the process. In turn, you need to listen to executive management to know their priorities, issues, and resource constraints. When facilitating maturity modeling, don’t drive toward a predefined outcome. Understand what executive management is comfortable implementing—and what the business or organization can afford.

STEP TWO: Identify leads who are responsible for each domain or subject area of the maturity model. Explain to these leads why the organization is implementing maturity modeling, expected outcomes, and how their input is invaluable to the effort’s success. Generally speaking, the leads responsible for subject areas are very receptive to maturity modeling, because—unlike an audit—a maturity model is a resource that allows staff to advocate their needs and to say: “These are the resources I need to achieve effective cybersecurity.”

Third, have either management or these subject area leads communicate the project details to the lower levels of the organization, and solicit feedback, because staff at these levels often have unique insight on how best to manage the details.

The fourth step is to just get to work. This work will look a little different from one organization to another, because every organization has its own processes, but overall you need to run the maturity model—that is, use the model to assess the organization and discover where it measures up for each subject area or domain. Afterwards, conduct work sessions, collect suggestions and recommendations for reaching specific maturity levels, determine what it’s going to cost to increase maturity, get approval from executive management to spend the money to make the necessary changes, and create a Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M). Then move forward and tick off each milestone.

Do you suggest selecting an executive sponsor or an executive steering committee to oversee the implementation?
RG: Absolutely. You just want to make sure the executive sponsors or steering committee members have both the ability and the authority to implement changes necessary for the modeling effort.

Should management consider hiring vendors to help implement their cybersecurity maturity models?
RG: Sure. Most organizations can implement a maturity model on their own, but the good thing about hiring a vendor is that a vendor brings objectivity to the process. Within your organization, you’re probably going to find erroneous assumptions, differing opinions about what needs to be improved, and bias regarding who is responsible for the improvements. An objective third party can help navigate these assumptions, opinions, and biases. Just be aware some vendors will push their own maturity models, because their models require or suggest organizations buy the vendors’ software. While most vendor software is excellent for improving maturity, you want to make sure the model you’re using fits your business objectives and is affordable. Don’t lose sight of that.

How long does it normally take to implement a maturity model?

RG: It depends on a variety of factors and is different for every organization. Keep in mind some maturity levels are fairly easy to reach, while others are harder and more expensive. It goes without saying that well-managed organizations implement maturity models more rapidly than poorly managed organizations.

What should management do after implementation?
RG: Run the maturity model again, and see where the organization currently measures up for each subject area or domain. Do you need to conduct a maturity model assessment every year? No, but you want to make sure you’re tracking the results year over year in order to make sure improvements are occurring. My suggestion is to conduct a maturity model assessment every three years.

One final note: make sure to maintain the effort. If you’re going to spend time and money implementing a maturity model, then make the changes, and continue to reassess maturity levels. Make sure the process becomes part of your organizations’ overall strategic plan. Document and institutionalize maturity modeling. Otherwise, the organization is in danger of losing this knowledge when the people who spearheaded the effort retire or pursue new opportunities elsewhere.

What’s next?
RG: Over the next couple of blogs, we’ll move away from talking about maturity modeling and begin talking about the role capacity plays in cybersecurity. Blog #3 will instruct managers on how to conduct an internal assessment to determine if their organizations have the people, processes, and technologies they need for effective cybersecurity.

Read our next cybersecurity playbook article, Tapping your internal capacity for better results: Cybersecurity playbook for management #3, here.

For professional baseball players who get paid millions to swing a bat, going through a slump is daunting. The mere thought of a slump conjures up frustration, anxiety and humiliation, and in extreme cases, the possibility of job loss.

The concept of a slump transcends sports. Just glance at the recent headlines about Yahoo, Equifax, Deloitte, and the Democratic National Committee. Data breaches occur on a regular basis. Like a baseball team experiencing a downswing, these organizations need to make adjustments, tough decisions, and major changes. Most importantly, they need to realize that cybersecurity is no longer the exclusive domain of Chief Information Security Officers and IT departments. Cybersecurity is the responsibility of all employees and managers: it takes a team.

When a cybersecurity breach occurs, people tend to focus on what goes wrong at the technical level. They often fail to see that cybersecurity begins at the strategic level. With this in mind, I am writing a blog series to outline the activities managers need to take to properly oversee cybersecurity, and remind readers that good cybersecurity takes a top-down approach. Consider the series a cybersecurity playbook for management. This Q&A blog — chapter 1 — highlights a basic concept of maturity modeling.

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a maturity model?
RG: A maturity model is a framework that assesses certain elements in an organization, and provides direction to improve these elements. There are project management, quality management, and cybersecurity maturity models.

Cybersecurity maturity modeling is used to set a cybersecurity target for management. It’s like creating and following an individual development program. It provides definitive steps to take to reach a maturity level that you’re comfortable with — both from a staffing perspective, and from a financial perspective. It’s a logical road map to make a business or organization more secure.

What are some well-known maturity models that agencies and companies use?
RG: One of the first, and most popular is the Program Review for Information Security Management Assistance (PRISMA), still in use today. Another is the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model, which focuses on technology. Then there are some commercial maturity models, such as the Gartner Maturity Model, that organizations can pay to use.

The model I prefer is the Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2), developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. I like C2M2 because it directly maps to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliance, which is a prominent industry standard. C2M2 is easily understandable and digestible, it scales to the size of the organization, and it is constantly updated to reflect the most recent U.S. government standards. So, it’s relevant to today’s operational environment.

Communication is one of C2M2’s strengths. Because there is a mechanism in the model requiring management to engage and support the technical staff, it facilitates communication and feedback at not just the operational level, but at the tactical level, and more significantly, the management level, where well-designed security programs start.

What’s the difference between processed-based and capability-based models?
RG: Processed-based models focus on performance or technical aspects — for example, how mature are processes for access controls? Capability-based models focus on management aspects — is management adequately training people to manage access controls?

C2M2 combines the two approaches. It provides practical steps your organization can take, both operationally and strategically. Not only does it provide the technical team with direction on what to do on a daily basis to help ensure cybersecurity, it also provides management with direction to help ensure that strategic goals are achieved.

Looking at the bigger picture, what does an organization look like from a managerial point of view?
RG: First, a mature organization communicates effectively. Management knows what is going on in their environment.

Most of them have very competent staff. However, staff members don’t always coordinate with others. I once did some security work for a company that had an insider threat. The insider threat was detected and dismissed from the company, but management didn’t know the details of why or how the situation occurred. Had there been an incident response plan in place (one of the dimensions C2M2 measures) — or even some degree of cybersecurity maturity in the company, they would’ve had clearly defined steps to take to handle the insider threat, and management would have been aware from an early stage. When management did find out about the insider threat, it became a much bigger issue than it had to be, and wasted time and resources. At the same time, the insider threat exposed the company to a high degree of risk. Because upper management was unaware, they were unable to make a strategic decision on how to act or react to the threat.

That’s the beauty of C2M2. It takes into account the responsibilities of both technical staff and management, and has a built-in communication plan that enables the team to work proactively instead of reactively, and shares cybersecurity initiatives between both management and technical staff.

Second, management in a mature organization knows they can’t protect everything in the environment — but they have a keen awareness of what is really important. Maturity modeling forces management to look at operations and identify what is critical and what really needs to be protected. Once management knows what is important, they can better align resources to meet particular challenges.

Third, in a mature organization, management knows they have a vital role to play in supporting the staff who address the day-to-day operational and technical tasks that ultimately support the organization’s cybersecurity strategy.

What types of businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies should practice maturity modeling?
RG: All of them. I’ve been in this industry a long time, and I always hear people say: “We’re too small; no one would take any interest in us.”

I conducted some work for a four-person firm that had been hired by the U.S. military. My company discovered that the firm had a breach and the four of them couldn’t believe it because they thought they were too small to be breached. It doesn’t matter what the size of your company is: if you have something someone finds very valuable, they’re going to try to steal it. Even very small companies should use cybersecurity models to reduce risk and help focus their limited resources on what is truly important. That’s maturity modeling: reducing risk by using approaches that make the most sense for your organization.

What’s management’s big takeaway?
RG: Cybersecurity maturity modeling aligns your assets with your funding and resources. One of the most difficult challenges for every organization is finding and retaining experienced security talent. Because maturity modeling outlines what expertise is needed where, it can help match the right talent to roles that meet the established goals.

So what’s next?
RG: In our next installment, we’ll analyze what a successful maturity modeling effort looks like. We’ll discuss the approach, what the outcome should be, and who should be involved in the process. We’ll discuss internal and external cybersecurity assessments, and incident response and recovery.

You can read our next chapter, Selecting and implementing a maturity model: Cybersecurity playbook for management #2, here.