Can you easily demonstrate and explain your compliance needs to executives?
If not, you need to make such capabilities a priority, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity.
According to the 2024 Investment Management Compliance Testing Survey of 595 industry participants, more than 57% of investment adviser firms reported an increase in the scope and frequency of cybersecurity compliance testing since January 2023.
An exceptionally straightforward overview of your cyber program to showcase on demand is a necessity for communicating your cybersecurity needs to executives. While cybersecurity has become more important at the executive level, driving more engagement from business leaders, you need a solution that is easy to grasp and operationalize to ensure swift adoption.
What is an executive snapshot?
An executive snapshot offers a clear summary of the current controls your company has in place to prevent cybersecurity breaches and attacks. This includes controls deemed high severity due to a lack of proper relevant protections currently implemented in your system.
When the time comes to demonstrate to executives the need for increased or improved cybersecurity, you need an overarching report of your cybersecurity strategy to present to your board and business leaders. Executive snapshots offer a consolidated, real-time view of your most vital cyber insights, including everything from governance and testing to remediation and forecasting.
How does an executive snapshot work?
Executive snapshots give you the ability prioritize specific risk remediations or cyber goals.
Two main components help to create an accurate executive snapshot:
- Risk Assessment: An initial risk assessment can identify weaknesses in your current cyber defenses, indicating where you should focus testing procedures for improvement.
- Cyber Benchmark: An executive snapshot compares your company to your peers, illustrating how you measure up and helping to map out where you want to go with your cyber program. Benchmarking can also be essential for showcasing the importance of strong cyber to executives.
What an executive snapshot ultimately accomplishes is providing executives with a detailed yet concise translation of the biggest cyber threats to the company. A snapshot emphasises the importance of strong cybersecurity for remaining competitive by comparing one company to its industry peers.
Some important cyber maturity tasks to pair with your executive snapshot include:
- Train all new employees in cyber security best practices as soon as possible, preferably during or around onboarding, or at least within six months.
- Consider the impact of breaches across other areas of the portfolio. An attack at another company can bring the bad actors sniffing for trouble at your doorstep as well.
- Perform a tabletop exercise practicing common cyber breaches at least once per year, and report the findings back to your executives.
Drawbridge helps you generate executive snapshots with greater speed
Drawbridge has a long history of helping our clients assess the strength of their cyber programs.
Serving more than 1,100 clients, we understand the complexities of protecting your company’s reputation and finances. Our platform allows you to track 200 different cyber controls to create a tailored cybersecurity snapshot that can be easily translated to executives.
Built into the Drawbridge platform, our executive snapshot capabilities give you a centralized and highly accessible overview of your cyber program. All you need to do is log into the platform to gain immediate visibility of your current cyber posture and maturity.
Our team has always taken the stance that cybersecurity is a compliance exercise, making detailed documentation a critical component of our solutions. Through our platform, you can easily export all of the documentation you need to make your snapshots all the more compelling and accurate.
For instance, let’s say you need to confirm that you have engaged with other businesses in the role of a provider from a specific date to the present date. With Drawbridge, investors can easily export this information directly from the platform. The information does not come in the form of a static PDF, but rather a self-sufficient source of evidence updated in real-time and exportable on demand.
How do demonstrate value to your limited partners? Or, equally important, how do you as an investor manage your risk-return input?
