Every organization has a unique IT infrastructure and business and security needs. As a result, designing, deploying, and managing a security infrastructure that meets a company’s security needs in its environment can be complex.
To help companies explore secure innovative design in a secure environment before adoption, MorganFranklin’s cybersecurity practice has developed the Cybersecurity Innovation Center (“CIC”). This serves as a catalyst for the development, innovation and growth of a global, capability-based cybersecurity and risk workforce.
What is the Cybersecurity Innovation Center?
The CIC is a customizable, virtualized environment implemented using infrastructure-as-code that allows us to utilize various tools techniques and capabilities as a powerful approach to problem-solving. The CIC also incorporates a cloud-based lab environment for supporting corporate cybersecurity development.
By utilizing the CIC, organizations can develop prototypes of potential ideas, concepts and solutions, and then test these against real threats. In collaboration with MorganFranklin, companies can deploy a realistic simulation of their live environments and use it to answer critical questions and derive key cybersecurity insights. This also allows companies to evaluate security technologies and test tactics and techniques before deploying them to a live environment.
How Can the CIC Help My Organization?
The CIC brings together stakeholders from diverse industry, technology, and cybersecurity functions with the aim to deliver industry-aligned, secure outcomes. The CIC’s virtualized environment makes it easy for an organization to deploy, customize, and take down the infrastructure as needed.
The CIC addresses the profoundly multifaceted challenges cybersecurity presents by bringing together experts in information security, governance, risk management and other functions to design, test and customize secure solutions for clients.
The CIC can help clients in the following areas:
- Evaluating Security Solutions
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- Due to the wide variety of security tools available, it can be difficult to determine which would meet an organization’s unique security needs. An effective evaluation of available solutions requires a vendor-agnostic, realistic environment where an organization can test out a tool’s features and capabilities.
- The CIC provides a simulated, vendor-neutral environment for evaluating security solutions. Companies can use the CIC to evaluate if they need a particular capability, its importance in the corporate cyber risk management strategy, and the best solution for the organization’s unique needs.
- Threat Research and Analysis
- Companies face rapidly evolving cyber threats. When a new attack tool, tactic, or technique emerges, it can be helpful for security personnel to have hands-on experience with how it works and its effects to learn how best to defend against it.
- The CIC provides a sandboxed, realistic environment for investigating cyber threats to an organization. Security analysts can perform simulated attacks, observe their effects, and test potential defensive strategies in a safe, isolated environment before implementing these defenses in the company’s production infrastructure.
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- These simulated attacks can also be used to inform an organization’s cybersecurity risk management and investment strategy. Based on simulations in the CIC, decision-makers can gain more accurate visibility into the probability and impact of various threats to the organization’s systems.
- These simulated attacks can also be used to inform an organization’s cybersecurity risk management and investment strategy. Based on simulations in the CIC, decision-makers can gain more accurate visibility into the probability and impact of various threats to the organization’s systems.
- Incident Response Capability Development
- A rapid, correct response is essential to minimizing the cost and damage of a cyberattack. One of the most effective methods of driving down the cost of a data breach or other cybersecurity incident is to have an incident response team in place with a tried and tested incident response plan.
- The CIC provides incident response teams with a realistic environment for performing cybersecurity exercises and testing and tuning their incident response strategies. This enables incident responders to gain valuable experience and streamline the incident response process, better preparing them to handle true threats to the organization.
Learn More About the Cybersecurity Innovation Center
The CIC provides organizations with the ability to use customized simulated infrastructure to answer key security questions and drive security innovation and program maturity. To learn more about the CIC and how it can benefit your organization’s security program, reach out for a personalized discussion at CyberBD@morganfranklin.com or learn more on our CIC information page.
