Resource Type: Research Report

Protect Your Organization’s Future with a Proactive Cyber Risk Management Strategy

Security and risk teams face the challenge of ensuring their current cyber risk management efforts are sufficient. A holistic approach helps identify risks and vulnerabilities while improving the ability to detect and mitigate attacks.

Discover an approach that combines proactive and reactive cyber risk management strategies in our commissioned Opportunity Snapshot conducted by Forrester Consulting.

Key Takeaways:

  • Current Cyber Risk Management Approaches: Learn how current strategies fail to address an organization’s full scope of risks.
  • Proactive and Reactive: Uncover a more comprehensive cyber risk approach that combines proactive and reactive strategies.
  • Third-Party Provider Benefits: See the potential of working with a third-party service provider for holistic risk reduction strategies.

Explore the benefits of a holistic cyber risk approach that blends proactive and reactive components to improve overall security and risk readiness.

Get your comprehensive guide to reducing your organizations risk

Critical Start Cyber Risk Landscape Peer Report

Security leaders are under increasing pressure to show the amount of risk their organization is accepting, and effectively communicate that data to key stakeholders. With this growing cyber risk management problem, security leaders want to know how their peers are handling these challenges and what the industry can do to help. 

Critical Start surveyed security leaders at various organizations about their confidence in their cybersecurity protection, the limitations of traditional security approaches, and if new proactive cyber risk reduction strategies should be implemented. The study revealed that 66% of organizations lack understanding of their own cyber risk, and 74% of organizations are planning to prioritize proactive risk reduction strategies to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. 

Download the full Cyber Risk Landscape Peer Report to learn more from fellow security leaders about their biggest cybersecurity challenges, their desire for a holistic approach to managing cyber risk, and how the market should respond. 

In this report you’ll find: 

  • Traditional security approaches have limited efficacy, with 67% of organizations experiencing a breach requiring attention within the last two years despite having traditional threat-based security measures in place. 
  • The cybersecurity landscape and cybersecurity leaders’ needs are changing as a result. 82% of organizations surveyed believe taking a managed cyber risk reduction approach will yield significant cyber protection benefits. 
  • Security leaders are facing significant challenges with cybersecurity visibility and resources, with 93% of organizations planning to offload segments of their cyber risk reduction workstreams to service providers within the next two years. 
  • Managed Cyber Risk Reduction (MCRR), the next evolution of Managed Detection and Response (MDR), can help organizations gain control of the risk they are willing to accept with a holistic, proactive approach to cybersecurity aligned to leading cybersecurity frameworks. 

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2023 Cyber Risk Confidence Index

Critical Start recently surveyed 501 U.S.-based IT security leaders at organizations ranging from 2,500-25,000 employees on their confidence in managing cyber risk, and how well their current strategies align to their organization’s risk appetite. The study revealed 66% of cybersecurity leaders are not highly confident that their current strategies for evaluating and mitigating major cyber risk are effective. Download the 2023 Cyber Risk Confidence Index for the full report, and to read about the challenges your peers are facing, along with recommendations for a more secure future.

In this report you’ll find:

  • Growing concern in the cyber threat landscape as threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated
  • An outlook on cybersecurity leaders’ confidence in their current cyber risk strategies
  • Current challenges security leaders face against a lack of resources, finances, and ability to strongly communicate how much risk their organizations are accepting with provable metrics and data
  • Desire for a more balanced approach to aligning cyber risk measures to organizations’ risk appetite and how the industry should respond

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2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services

Critical Start is recognized in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services! “MDR services provide customers with remotely delivered, human led, turnkey, modern SOC functions; ultimately delivering threat disruption and containment. Security and risk management leaders should use this research to identify MDR services that meet their business-driven risk requirements.” (Gartner®, 2023)

Key Findings:

  • Misnamed technology-centric offerings and vendor-delivered service wrappers (VDSW), that fail to deliver human-driven managed detection and response (MDR) services, are causing challenges for buyers looking to identify and select an outcome-driven provider.
  • Turnkey threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) capabilities are a core requirement for buyers of MDR services who demand remotely delivered services deployed quickly and predictably.
  • MDR buyers must focus on the ability to provide context-driven insights that will directly impact their business objectives, as wide-scale collection of telemetry and automated analysis are insufficient when facing uncommon threats.
  • An increasing number of MDR customers demand that providers are able to remotely initiate measures for active containment or disruption of a threat, yet vendor autonomy still varies. Factors including: trust, geography and the security maturity of the consuming organization affect adoption.

Published 14 February 2023
By Analyst(s): Pete Shoard, Al Price, Mitchell Schneider, Craig Lawson, Andrew Davies

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CRITICALSTART® is listed by Gartner as a Representative Vendor for MDR.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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CRITICALSTART® and MOBILESOC® are federally registered trademarks owned by Critical Start. Critical Start also claims trademark rights in the following: Cyber Operations Risk & Response™ platform, and Trusted Behavior Registry®. Any unauthorized use is expressly prohibited.

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