Why Don’t Businesses Do Network Assessments?

Too often network assessments land hard at the bottom of a to-do list as each day’s urgencies move unrelenting to the top of our attentions.

Or a network assessment – accounting for and understanding the access and role(s) of every asset on the network – seems like a painful and slow job. And what is the return for all the effort?

Also why should you trust the analysis software? Why give access to your data to a company you don’t know?

Leadership is putting first things first

– Stephen Covey

Nobody wants their business or IT department to be running out of control, constantly putting out the fires of urgency. Well, a network assessment is a way to exercise control, of putting things in order.

With a network assessment you get a detailed look into your computer system that brings to light any of its weaknesses. And by performing a network assessment, not only can you identify otherwise hard-to-detect issues, but you also gain perspective to devise a plan for the necessary fixes, and track the progress of your network’s improvement.

With the network assessment information you can:

• develop solutions based on the issues detected by the assessment
• protect your IT infrastructure from various external and internal threats
• prioritize remediation of issues that may have been revealed
• measure overall network health
• guard against unexpected downtime
• detect anomalous activities by thoroughly analyzing log-in histories

Yeah, but what’s the ROI?

But it can be difficult to allocate resources to something that’s not directly making money or saving money (or saving the business, e.g. remediating a ransomware attack). Still keeping track of all the desktops, phones, tablets, laptops, IoT devices, printers and servers on a growing organization’s network is foundational for managing the vulnerabilities of and threats to your network.

Unless you know the devices on the network, it’s not possible to know the network’s health. Without up-to-date IT network assessments, you run the risk of not detecting security lapses before it’s too late.

Network assessments can help you get a comprehensive view of your network to make informed security decisions. Why is this important? How will you be able to evaluate any product or service that comes along unless you know what aspect of your network actually wants help and attention? And without measuring vulnerabilities via a scoring system, you have no basis against which to test if you’ve improved your security.

According to securityboulevard.com, in a survey of over 3000 small- to medium-sized businesses sixty percent choose to ignore the possibility of attack and breach risks.¹ Those risks include taking nearly 200 days to detect a breach and thereafter seventy days to contain it² and an average cost of $5.66 million per ransomware attack.³ Also ransomware attacks can upset your customers, damage your reputation, open you to the risk of data exfiltration. So consider the ROI of a network assessment part of the ROI of prevention.

Am I opening my business up to security risks?

If you use a third-party, like Bryley, to assess your infrastructure, they must approach with due-diligence. You must be able to ask for a non-disclosure agreement to assure that the contents of the reports remain in confidence between the IT provider and you. Also ask if the auditing software tool is non-invasive and immediately and thoroughly removed upon the assessment’s completion (this is the case with Bryley’s procedure). It also makes sense to contract with steady, solid, battle-scarred veterans – both the engineers and the software developers – that have diagnosed and corrected all kinds of systems and have themselves been improved in the process.

Third-party experts bring objectivity

Contracting a third-party to perform a network assessment gets the burden of the job off the shoulders of an IT department that may have the assessment at the bottom of their to-dos. So you’ll know the assessment will get done.

While an in-house IT team probably has important insight into your system, third-party assessors can see the forest from the trees – a high-level view of the whole network and the minute parts of it. A third-party will see deficiencies in a system that an internal team can miss.

If you’re interested in learning more about Bryley Systems Network Assessments for your system and setting a firm foundation for your organization’s infrastructure and its related policies and procedures, email ITExperts@Bryley.com or call 978.562.6077.

^{1 https://securityboulevard.com/2019/06/15-small-business-cyber-security-statistics-that-you-need-to-know/}

^{2 IBM Cost of Data Breach Report}

^{3 https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/ransomware-recovery-can-be-costly-and-not-just-because-of-the-ransom/}