It’s hard to limit risks to your organization if you don’t have a process in place for identifying and mitigating them. We will help develop your enterprise’s risk management framework to guide decision-making at every step of your growth. From the larger, strategic decisions down to the detailed work your team handles daily, every decision is best guided by a thorough and stress-tested plan. 

CIOSO excels at evaluating and modernizing organizations’ security frameworks. We help define the policies and procedures that, in combination with the appropriate talent and available technology, will best protect your organization, customers, and data. In addition, we will develop a roadmap for you to implement the procedures, install the technology, and put the right people in place to maximize your chances of success.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM), designed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in 1987, is a framework that allows organizations to mature and refine their software development process. CIOSO is well-versed in CMM and how to use it to optimize resources, manage product quality, and improve software security as development matures. We recommend subsets of this standardized framework to our customers and then assess that organization’s capability using CMMI Maturity ratings. We support most available maturity models, focusing on NIST CSF (National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework) or industry-specific models as applicable.

CIOSO examines the full scope of your capabilities and will provide you with a thorough evaluation with a strategic eye and high levels of actionable detail. Our findings across people, processes, and technology will be made available so you can see what’s working best and what needs improvement in the context of a common control framework.

A successful company begins with the right team. CIOSO will analyze how your organization utilizes its resources—in particular, its people. We then help determine the right approach to growth without introducing additional risks. Effectively applying the resources and people you have at your disposal is a key part of meeting project deadlines and keeping costs from ballooning. 

Every team needs different human resources. We will assess your team’s experience, expertise, education, and training to identify shortfalls that need to be addressed. Perhaps a new hire is needed to bring a fresh perspective, or specific training is required for certain team members. 

If resources are being misused, we’ll identify them and offer you suggestions for more efficient utilization. We like to look at these scenarios as opportunities—giving an individual on your team the ability to work more efficiently, effectively, or enthusiastically can have a significant positive impact on productivity and employee morale.

Sometimes it can be hard to take a step back and get a holistic view of your technology portfolio.

• How is it all working together?
• Are there gaps that need to be addressed, or redundancies that can be trimmed?
• Are you overspending on some areas while leaving others underfunded

CIOSO will review actual technology spending alongside planned spending. We categorize by technology capability and value to help identify if the amount you’re spending in an area is appropriate relative to the cybersecurity risk involved. In addition, we help to ensure that your technology spending is not only adding value to your processes and keeping risks at bay but also aligning with your overall business goals.

No risk management process is complete without proper risk assessment and ranking. CIOSO will help your organization identify the myriad of capability, technology, and security risks that could affect you. Ranking them by likelihood of occurrence and severity, we identify the risks that require attention immediately and those that are less urgent. We’ll recommend improvements based on business, technology, and cybersecurity risks—and suggest a course of action to effectively address them.

It’s important to assess the progress of any plan at routine intervals to ensure progress and then make adjustments as necessary. Risk prevention plans are no different. Modern cybersecurity tools make a plethora of metrics available, and CIOSO will determine which metrics are most useful to your organization.

We help you track your organization’s changes over time in:

• Resource allocation
• Capability maturity
• Technology performance (both legacy tech and newly implemented devices and software)
• Risk management capabilities

We look at your progress and set a timeframe to address any issues identified. From there, we help you determine the recommended next steps, and if necessary, the required adjustments to your strategicplan to meet your desired risk management outcomes. We track capability maturity, objective completion, key risk indicators, and more for proper trend analysis and strategic planning. We set goals for the metrics that are most important to your organization and create tools to track progress against those goals.

There’s nothing wrong with changing a plan partway through if you’re adjusting to new circumstances or performance that differs from what you originally expected. It’s those who refuse to course-correct who get left behind.

Going public entails much more than companies realize; it requires a thorough understanding of the process and what it means for a company’s DNA. Successful IPOs happen at companies that have adapted their processes, people, and technology to become publicly traded well before the initial offering.

CIOSO helps companies and their employees prepare for an IPO. We help you strategically determine the best timing and structure of the offering and ensure you have the capabilities internally to handle the advanced compliance mandates of a public company, increase transparency, bolster security, and allocate your resources appropriately.

Let CIOSO serve as your primary mode of communication between your Board of Directors and other parties, such as government agencies, industry groups, and even the company’s CEO. With communication serving a pivotal role it’s important to have an experienced board liaison guiding all parties. Communicating the progress of risk management and cybersecurity initiatives to the board in a way that gives them the confidence to proceed and furnishes the information they need to make better, more informed decisions is invaluable.

We provide independent oversight of cybersecurity and technology programs in order to meet the SEC’s cybersecurity rules. All publicly traded companies must also provide annual reports to the SEC. In many cases, additional reports such as climate and sustainability disclosures are rapidly becoming the norm. We expect to see more of them in the coming years.

CIOSO will guide you through providing disclosures to the SEC and other regulatory bodies with clear checklists and timelines. We’ll also work with your legal counsel, compliance, and leadership team to assess controls and procedures for limiting cybersecurity and technology risks. With our assistance, you’ll have a clear view of which disclosures apply to your organization so you won’t be blindsided when the time comes to file.

You can benefit from the wisdom CIOSO can bring to your incident response preparation. We have years of experience helping businesses build a strategy for IR, determining what forensics partners best fit an organization, building out a playbook, and determining what aspects of an IR plan should be prioritized in what order. Let us support you through an investigation with interpretation and reaction guidance, leveraging our expertise to prepare your organization to be ready for a myriad of incidents that could arise.