Build a Resilient Cybersecurity Roadmap for Your Enterprise

A cybersecurity roadmap clearly prioritizes projects and corrective actions against the gaps and vulnerabilities cybersecurity leaders identify during strategic planning. Here’s how to create yours.

A cybersecurity roadmap emerges directly from the process of developing an annual strategy for the cybersecurity program. That strategic planning process starts by crafting a vision for cybersecurity grounded in real-world drivers related to the business, technology and the broader economic environment.

Once organizations have defined their vision, they must assess the current state of the program and identify gaps they must close to make the vision a reality (for more on cybersecurity strategic planning, visit Cybersecurity Strategy Best Practices).

To get the best view of the current state of the program, use a combination of different assessment types. Examples include:

• Control effectiveness assessments to determine the maturity of control implementation, benchmarked to similar peers and aligned to industry standards

• Vulnerability assessments and penetration tests to assess the technical infrastructure

• Risk assessments, including industry, geopolitics, third party and resiliency factors, to balance the investment in controls appropriate to the actual risks 

• Recent audit findings

• Program management assessments to evaluate and benchmark the maturity of cybersecurity policies, processes and programs

• Cybersecurity spending and staffing benchmarks to compare resourcing to peers

Summarize the assessment results in a “current state” document. Then, map the current state to the vision statement and identify gaps between them. The gap analysis will typically result in a list of projects and actions the cybersecurity program could take on in the coming year.

Some of the gaps will catalyze clear actions. For example, a lack of standard guidance for public cloud computing partners points to the need to develop cybersecurity policies for the cloud context.

Gaps don’t always have obvious actions associated with them, however. That is especially true for gaps that exist due to multiple factors and dependencies. For example, a gap between the current level of maturity for security governance and the level defined by your vision will require a problem-solving deep dive to produce an improvement plan.

Few organizations have the resources to execute on all of the identified activities in the same planning period. Cybersecurity leaders must instead set priorities using the following criteria:

• The level of risk reduction potential of a given project or activity

• The resources required, such as skills, staff and systems

• The financial cost

• The time to value, or the period between when the organization starts the project and when it can start to see value from it

Decide not only which projects to prioritize but also their sequence and pacing. Choose a mix of longer and shorter time-to-value projects within the planning period and prioritize them in a way that allows the security team to demonstrate progress each quarter. This helps maintain both team energy levels and executive support for the security program.

Be sure to clarify the links between a priority project or activity, and the business objectives and drivers that informed the vision statement. That helps support effective executive communication.

The roadmap should be easy to read, and accessible to anyone who needs it. The roadmap report and the presentation should also clearly describe the current and desired states of the cybersecurity program and how the priority projects will help achieve the vision. These factors increase the chances that the roadmap does its job to cultivate support from the organization and connect strategy to execution for cybersecurity teams.

Optimizing communication and usability may require the cybersecurity team to develop distinct versions of the roadmap for different audiences. The format and content for the executive version, for example, may focus on how the items on the roadmap connect to specific business goals. The format and content for the mid-management staff, in contrast, may highlight the various steps involved in different projects, as well as any additional data gathering or problem solving that needs to happen as part of a project.

An effective cybersecurity roadmap is:

• Timely — Deliver and update the roadmap on a cadence that the intended audience needs.

• Intuitive — Make the roadmap easily understood by the intended audience. Repurpose for other audiences by changing the altitude or lens, while keeping the same data elements.

• Actionable — Ensure the roadmap is clear and can be immediately used to enable execution by stakeholders. Include the right information for stakeholders and make it easy to find.

Typical cybersecurity roadmaps also reflect risk prioritization and any interdependencies that a given initiative has with other projects in the portfolio. 

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