Today’s top executives including board members of organizations increasingly recognize that a cyberattack could cripple their operations and may result in millions of dollars in lost business and reputational damage as well as cleanup costs. Maturity models are effective tools to improve an organization’s cybersecurity capabilities and respective outcomes. For an enterprise, key is the selection of a model or models and how they are going to use it.

It is important that your team responsible for cyber security, understands the cyber security maturity model concepts available, and examines them with their recent examples/ experiences in cyber security/ resilience domains. It is paramount to choose the right model for the specific needs of your business and the vertical that you operate in.

• In simple terms, they are the methodology to convey a path of experience, knowledge, precision, or acculturation.
• They Help distinguish between organizations in which security is baked in and those in which it is merely bolted on
• They Empower organizational leadership with a way to measure the progress made in embedding security into its day-to-day and strategic operations
• The subject of a Cyber security Maturity model can be your work force, practices, processes, tools, technologies and controls in place.

• They are a Means for assessing and benchmarking your cyber performance.
• They give you the Ability to assess how a set of cyber strengths have evolved over the period
• They are a Means to identify cyber gaps and develop improvement plans
• They identify Short and Long-Term Roadmaps for model-based improvements
• They Demonstrate results of improvement efforts

A cyber security maturity model calls for a range of capabilities that you would expect to see in an organization with an effective approach to cyber security. These capabilities will include things like effective leadership and governance or information risk management processes. Each capability will have a description of the kinds of activities and processes you would expect to see present in the organization, at different levels of maturity. An organization seeking to assess its overall cybersecurity maturity would compare its own practices against those described in the levels of each capability. These assessments would need to be backed up by some sort of evidence to justify the assessment(s) made.