Cyber Security Assessment
How Well Prepared are You For a Zero-Day Attack?
A Cyber Security Assessment is used to identify, estimate, and prioritize risk to organizational operations, assets, and individuals resulting from the operation and use of information systems. Extensive effort is taken to review the company's approach to how Cyber Security is self managed. That approach is balanced against industry standards and graded accordingly. The environment as a whole is then reviewed for potential Cyber Security issues. Recommendations are provided based on total findings.
If you feel your organization has a handle on Cyber Security and just want to verify that this can be done as a one time service. If you feel there is room for improvement we would recommend a monthly or quarterly program where issues are identified, prioritized, and a remediation plan developed. This type of an approach ensures that you are actively working to protect your organization.
Operational Assessment
How Does Each Employee's Tasks Tie Together and Add Value to the Overall Process?
What are the daily tasks? Who is responsible for what? How are things completed? Why does everyone do what they do? These are the types of questions we will answer with an Operational Assessment. Often times we have convinced ourselves who are top performers are but in reality the true strength of the organization is hidden.
Who: We will formalize the organizational layout of your company. We typically find a management view of the org chart but don't have a layout of everyone on staff. We will not limit this to company employees. We will also identify and properly place any external or temporary resources. A full review of job descriptions in line with their daily responsibilities will be evaluated.
What: Formal job responsibilities and daily job tasks reviewed and documented. This will be in both a process flow and SOP format. Ideally, each work area has already prepared SOPs which can just be reviewed and documented.
Why: Each functional process is tied to a higher purpose. Are there customer specific requirements? Are there vendor specific requirements? Do you have industry certifications that require specific processes be followed? We will help identify these and scope them out to each employees individual responsibilities. We will tie all your processes together from procure to pay, order to cash, and all other supporting departments.
Organizational Assessment
How Healthy is Your Business?
Utilizing the Institutional and Organizational Assessment (IOA) Model, Appleridge Technical Services will help you define and improve the business' overall performance through analyzing its environment, motivation and capacity. Diagnose institutional strengths and weaknesses by evaluating four key areas of your company: Environment, Capacity, Motivation, and Performance.
Environment: The balance between a company and its external environment is key in determining the ease in which the company can perform at a high level. An evaluation of the external environment will help identify conditions which are not conducive with an organizations future success. A thorough review of how politics, the economy, available technology and others work hand in hand with your organization.
Capacity: The ability of an organization to utilize all available resources to perform on a daily basis. Resources can be singly focused on personnel or more broad and include processes and systems. How you manage the organization financially. What inter-organizational relationships exist. Infrastructure, program management, and the organizational structure are all outlined , and intimately involved in determining the company's capacity.
Motivation: The personality of the organization. Motivation shows what drives the overall performance of a company's employees. Where the company came from and how it will get to it's final destination. The Executive Team has it's opportunity to present their Vision and how they mold the business around that.
Performance: An organization can be rated as a good performer when it balances effectiveness, efficiency and relevance while maintaining financial viability. Performance is most typically the most visible and how the company is judged. Extensive effort must be taken to ensure that Performance is properly understood.
Technology Assessment
Do You Truly Understand Your Technology Capabilities?
The black box of most organizations is IT. Very rarely does anyone understand what IT does, how it does it and why it costs so much. Getting to the bottom of these questions will ensure a strong alignment between the business units and IT. There should never be this misconception that IT doesn't do anything. On the same note no executive should ever have a feeling that they don't know what IT does. Everyone deserves to understand the value IT brings and how the daily workings of IT add value to the organization.
The first half of this assessment is focused more on documentation and policy. Think of this as the "What We Aim For" portion of the assessment. Strategy, Process and Governance generally lay the framework for your IT offerings.
Strategy: A full review of your current IT Strategy and how it lines up with the Corporate Strategy. Ensuring clarity around the IT Strategy within the organization ensures the value that IT delivers.
Process: Formalizing the processes used within IT and documenting what those are. Protect your organization from IT Turnover and employees who don't follow procedure. Ensure that your processes are following current trends and not putting you in a hole. A review of all documented processes will show gaps and help identify risks to the organization.
Governance: IT Governance is defined as the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve it's goals. In the Process stage we evaluate how IT does what it does. In the Governance stage we align that with how IT is helping the organization meet it's goals. We want to ensure that the use of information and technology within your organization generate value to the business, as we assume you do as well.
The second half of this assessment focuses on what IT has provided to the organization. We take a deep look at what vendors and services you do business with. The we focus in on the infrastructure and applications that have been deployed.
Services: This focuses in on the vendors and external services your technology team has partnered with. This lays the framework for tools and technologies that you are housing internally. We will review all vendors and services not just those deemed essential.
Infrastructure: The hardware side of your business. Typically we see evidence of workstations, printers, copiers, scanners and servers. Often overlooked are the phone system, physical security, networking components and A/V hardware. Putting together a comprehensive view of everything that is used corporate wide ensures that everyone is on the same page.
Applications: The software side of your business. There are some solutions we expect to find deployed, email / Microsoft Office / ERP. We take inventory of all of those but then we take a deeper look and try and identify commercially available applications that your technology team has chosen to deploy. Even more importantly we will help you identify the custom written applications used everyday at your organization. Those can be stand alone or customizations to other solutions. Typically most ERP systems have customizations specific to your organization. Rarely are those customizations documented and truly understood. When reviewing all applications we will look at what is offered, what is being used and the future of that solution.
The Comprehensive
Do you want a complete evaluation of your business?
The comprehensive is the most in depth evaluation that we offer. A merging of our four offered assessments broken into four distinct phases delivered in one final report. The four combined assessments are:
- Cyber Security Assessment
- Operational Assessment
- Organizational Assessment
- Technology Assessment
If you find that the comprehensive is too much or you don't find value in one or two of the individual assessments we can custom tailor something for you, to meet your needs.