If we have selected the wrong experience for you, please change it above.
The challenge: Timely cybersecurity
The newly hired chief digital and information officer (CDIO) at this fast-growing drugmaker had a dilemma on his hands. He had discovered some foundational gaps in the company’s cybersecurity operations and suspected there were others. The board of directors was expecting a report on the cyber situation, but the CDIO’s resources for further action were limited. Moreover, the contract with his current managed services provider was expiring, and he was up against the clock transitioning to the new provider’s platform.
It was time to call in reinforcements. What would it take to stand up a minimum viable security program?
The preparation: Finding strengths to build upon
To help the CDIO quickly understand the organization’s most critical cybersecurity gaps and priorities, Deloitte launched an accelerated cyber assessment (ACA), a focused version of our standard cyber assessment designed to deliver timely, actionable insights within the company’s resource and transition constraints.
The assessment took three weeks in this case. During that time, we uncovered several immediate actions the client could take to significantly improve its cybersecurity environment.
What would it take to stand up a minimum viable security program?
The solution: Three paths to enhanced cybersecurity
- Strategy: We recommended putting a cybersecurity strategy in place under the guidance of a dedicated strategic adviser from Deloitte and making certain improvements to the controls environment, such as configuring multi-factor authentication.
- Operations: Action items included implementing 24/7 security monitoring of endpoints, carrying out vulnerability management, adding log sources to provide a broader picture of security threats and system behavior, and developing an incident response plan.
- Continuous improvement: We found improvement opportunities in asset management, data protection, and data classification, as well as in some of the company’s disaster recovery and business continuity protocols.
Implementing the recommendations
We prioritized our recommendations by impact and overall level of effort. Then we put together a roadmap of goals to work toward, along with the resources to help address each one, so the company’s cyber operations could move up the maturity curve over time.
After reviewing our findings, the CDIO engaged the ACA team to help implement the improvement opportunities. We worked collaboratively with the internal IT team in the United States as well as in its overseas operation,. Together, we documented the cybersecurity environment’s architecture and processes. We also kept track of the improvements we put in place—including tool configurations—and the capabilities required to help the client keep its cyber operations running smoothly.
The impact: Elevated cybersecurity foundations
Within three months, the company went from very little cyber capability to a foundational security baseline. From there, it transitioned smoothly into a longer-term arrangement in which Deloitte began to handle around-the-clock security monitoring by standing up a Cyber Operate command center. The new arrangement included several flexible hours that Deloitte provided for tackling additional cybersecurity priorities uncovered during the previous three months of post-ACA work.
High-quality cybersecurity is achievable even for emerging companies where capacity is at a premium. Our stakeholder needed to know what could be done in the shortest time frame to move the needle significantly. We took what we found, prioritized what we knew, and worked alongside the client’s team to build out some of the additional capabilities to help them start maturing their security within a compressed timeline.
About Deloitte’s Cyber Operate
Deloitte’s Cyber Operate managed security services bring cloud-based threat hunting, detection, response, and remediation capabilities to your cybersecurity environment. Specialists help organizations identify and prioritize emerging threats, then respond quickly to reduce business impact when incidents occur. Example services include:
- Cyber threat intelligence
- Cyber tabletop exercises
- Incident readiness and response
- Zero Trust identity prevention, detection and response
- Enterprise prevention, detection and response
- Attack surface management and vulnerability management
- Multi-cloud security
Learn more on our managed services page.
Chris Stanoch
