The importance of detecting and remediating vulnerabilities throughout your IT environment.

Hackers are actually more likely to go after smaller businesses as they lack the thorough, expensive security measures of their larger counterparts—they’re generally less prepared. However, any organization that doesn’t comply with its industry’s specific regulations is at high risk of a security breach. Noncompliance can also lead to other consequences, including legal penalties, damage to reputation and loss of third-party trust.
(Forbes Innovation, What Every Business Should Know About Cybersecurity Compliance, 2023). 

Complying with the IT regulatory standards required within your industry can be a complex and time-consuming task. But, as cited above, it is of course absolutely essential – to protect your business and stay ahead of the game in dealing with the ever-growing dangers and sophistication of cybercrime.

In this blog we look at the costs of compliance – and non-compliance – and how it can be resolved efficiently and effectively with a single end-to-end solution.

The cost of compliance

The cost of setting up a compliance team and ensuring that it is always up to date with both regulations and risk, is considerable – for many businesses, it becomes a significant strain on both financial and IT resources. In some sectors, it reaches eyewatering levels and represents a significant proportion of their turnover:

Financial crime compliance spend for 2022 equivalent to three-quarters of UK defence budget.
(LexisNexis True Cost of Compliance 2023 Report, financial services sector). 

Across all sectors, achieving and maintaining compliance is a rising cost, and with IT vulnerability risks up by 47% since 2021 another statistic underlines the extent of the challenge facing businesses:

Nearly half – 49.9% – of vulnerabilities revealed, on average, have a negative impact on Cyber Essentials Plus compliance.

Vulnerabilities can be identified to a certain extent with regular scanning. Remediating them rapidly and effectively, however, calls for another set of capabilities most businesses simply don’t have in-house.

The cost of non-compliance

Regulatory requirements vary across sectors, and in some there can be substantial fines and other punitive measures for non-compliance. But that’s just part of the true cost.

Compliance is not a simple box-ticking exercise, it’s an important element in the way we work. It’s there to protect businesses, finances, reputations, customers, data and third parties – and to ensure they’re operating in a safe and secure environment of mutual trust. Non-compliance can compromise almost every area of an organisation:

Potential data breaches
90% of cybercrime comes through non-compliant and thus vulnerable weaknesses. It can take the form of ransomware and other attacks, and with cybercriminals becoming increasingly sophisticated data compromise can have far-reaching consequences.

Loss of customers
Negative experiences will lead to customer migration, and/or reputational damage with less repeat business and recommendations to other customers. Public perception is both important, and fragile. Reputational damage can be near fatal.

Operational disruption
Systems may have to be closed down while remediative action is taken. More than that, though, regulatory bodies often have the power to enforce compliance changes. The ramifications of which have been seen very recently, and dramatically, in the case of the Law Society, where large numbers of legal companies under their authority were unable to access their case files, particularly affecting house purchases and legal aid – because of a breach of compliance at a third-party service provider.

So, what’s the solution?

Review, Reveal, Remediate.

Hardware, software, third parties, networks, apps – potential vulnerabilities are lurking anywhere and everywhere, and every one of them could affect your security and your compliance.

Vulnerability Detection and Remediation – VDR – from LIMA delivers a uniquely effective solution. It reviews every aspect of your entire IT environment to reveal all vulnerabilities, across 500+ technologies. And it remediates them in a single end-to-end service backed by outstanding SLA levels

Here are a couple of findings which may startle you:

• At the point of the first VDR scan, the average ratio of vulnerabilities to assets revealed is 15 to 1. 

• Organisations may of course have dozens, or hundreds of assets – the total number of vulnerabilities we find with initial scans often runs into thousands.

• The oldest vulnerability revealed by VDR in 2023 dated back to 1999 – and new risks are relentlessly arising in vast waves as cyber complexity – and crime – moves forward faster and faster.

So, if you’re not regularly reviewing your IT security, you are very likely to be risk. But it’s not enough to identify your weaknesses: they must be fixed, too. That’s where VDR makes a real difference: it does it all, seamlessly – and swiftly.

VDR proactively assesses and manages security risks to protect against cyber-attacks and data breaches to ensure that businesses meet industry regulations. Its guaranteed SLA, aligned to Cyber Essentials Plus, ensures compliance requirements are met, whether it’s for cyber insurance, CE+ and similar frameworks or ISO 25001.

In fact, VDR outperforms CE+ requirements of 3 days for Windows and 14 days for infrastructure, with KPIs of 2 days for Windows and 7 days for infrastructure. Vulnerabilities are priority labeled for remediation, and a team with 25+ years of specialist experience ensure that IT compliance is guaranteed.

VDR – IT Compliance as a Service

IT teams within a typical organisation are not security trained, skilled or focused. Their capabilities lie elsewhere – even the compliance officers, whose expertise may be, for instance in organisational matters. They don’t produce security solutions. Regulatory standards like ISO, GPDR, CE+ don’t produce those solutions either – they just say what’s required.

Translating those standards into action into policies, procedures, technologies – and solutions – is down to the IT department. That’s where the experience and expertise of the LIMA team, and VDR, make all the difference. Providing IT Compliance as a Service (IT CaaS), out of a box, set up easily and guaranteeing that vulnerabilities are found and fixed for you.

With this enormous task taken care of, IT teams are freed up to focus on other business-critical functions, and management can be confident that IT compliance is ensured at all times without the expense of setting up their own specialist teams and systems.

VDR is a complete and cost-effective solution to compliance and strengthening your security posture – taking it to the levels enjoyed by large enterprises with expensive in-house teams.

To get a free trial and experience VDR in action talk to LIMA today on 0345 3451 110 or email enquiries@lima.co.uk.