Importance of Network Security Assessment

Security Risk Assessment Methodology

Most basic risk assessments follow the same general steps.

network security assessment

1. Create a resource list

What is your company's most valuable asset? Before testing for vulnerabilities, organizations should reconsider the networks, devices, data, and other assets they want to protect. As part of this step, you should document your entire IT infrastructure. This will give you a full map of your network, so if you get hacked, you can quickly find the attacker.

2. Assess the vulnerability of your assets

Once you know what your assets are, you can start investigating to find vulnerabilities. Threats can come from anywhere outside your organization, internally with poor security practices, or from third parties with poor security practices and accessing your network. Risks can vary widely, so the assessment should be comprehensive. A good rating should include:

Thorough scan of all ports and other vectors on the network

Assess your inner weaknesses

Discover Wi-Fi, Internet of Things and other wireless networks

Review third-party access to networks and assets

Review policies for employee behavior such as bringing fraudulent devices or opening suspicious emails.

3. Defense test

At this point, some organizations can aggressively test their defenses by running penetration testing to see if an attacker can easily compromise their assets. Assessment is important to identify risks, but penetration testing shows how easy it is to compromise your network.

4. Weakness Support

At this point, you may have noticed some weaknesses in your network. Create a list of vulnerabilities and develop a remediation plan.

5. Continuous security monitoring

The most comprehensive and best network risk security assessments don't keep your assets safe forever. As threats and technologies constantly change, so does risk, so it is important to continuously monitor and review the risk landscape so that organizations can respond quickly and efficiently to new attacks or threats.

How can SecurityScorecard help?

Risk management is difficult without seeing a complete picture of an organization's vulnerabilities. This is why network security assessment is so important. It will help you develop an IT infrastructure map that shows where all your vulnerabilities are.

To keep this map up to date on a daily basis, it is important to invest in smart tools that scan your infrastructure for vulnerabilities. SecurityScorecard, for example, allows you to easily monitor your entire organization's security risk, providing a tailored view of your overall footprint.

Our custom scorecards provide portfolio cybersecurity risk monitoring, remediation and documentation, enabling organizations to protect their systems, networks, software and data.

Custom scorecards allow organizations to gain more insight into how different lines of business affect their safety scores. It also provides suggestions to help you solve the problem of lowering your security score, so you can always keep your network safe.