A security assessment plan is the apple to the health of your IT assets (the one that keeps the doctors away). 

It is an extensive and proactive evaluation of your company's security disposition and IT infrastructure. This includes elaborate and timely sanitation checks, scans, audits, network and technology compliance, etc.

Besides, it helps companies detect and predict vulnerabilities within their IT ecosystem and recommend strategies to mitigate the same. 

Here's what the numbers say about security assessment

1. Having a security assessment plan safeguards companies against avoidable downtimes, repair costs, and most importantly cyber breaches, 95% of which are caused by human error and negligence. 

2. And given that the average time to even detect a data breach in 2021 was 212 days, it might be too late to cross this bridge when you get there. 

So here's a step-by-step process of building a security assessment plan for your company.

Step #1: Map your assets and identify security threats or vulnerabilities 

Before you even begin sanitizing your IT infrastructure, study your potentially weak assets and dormant systems to produce a map to navigate your assessment strategy. 

Once done, you must assess the operational value and data flow of these assets and further categorize the data (for eg: Public, confidential, compliance restricted, etc.) according to their use cases. 

Step #2: Prioritize your risks 

No matter the competence of your plan, you cannot regulate all detected vulnerabilities at once, and neither do all vulnerabilities need immediate mitigation. 

To determine the flow of remedy, measure the risk associated with each vulnerability and take action against the risk you want to avoid most urgently. 

Step #3: Evaluate the risk assessment report 

If you cannot manually prioritize the vulnerabilities to remedy, you can employ effective assessment to tangible measure the risk and rank them for a more streamlined mitigation approach. 

Step #4: Develop a mitigation plan

The redemption plan doesn't solely aim to establish a step-by-step plan to individually mitigate the detected (and prioritized) risks. 

The ideal outcome of an effective mitigation plan is to come up with multiple effective solutions, so you can choose the most cost-effective one. 

Note: in this context, the cost isn't limited to the financial bearings of the process but also any business disruptions that can be caused by risk mitigation actions. This can include the downtime that certain assets can experience during their remedy. 

Step #5: Implement recommendations and assess results 

Once the plan is good to go, it is time to implement the plan into action. 

It is important that the team involved in vulnerability management be thoroughly informed of the plan and on the same page about its proceedings. There needs to be an established system the team can rely on. 

Once the plan is put into action, measure the success rate of the operation. If the plan was effectively based on the cost, time, and strength of the solution, take note and repeat when needed. 

The bottom line

Creating a security alert plan and proactively implementing them can drastically improve the health of your IT assets and safeguard your infrastructure from attacks and breaches. 

The idea is not to come up with just brilliant solutions but to arrive at a system that foresees and resolves vulnerabilities in advance.