According to most cyber security managers, cyber security should always be measurable and focused on results. The return on investment is not always a direct financial return, but it should be monitored for each action or tool used to track the evolution of assets or products.

It is crucial to think of cyber security as a business enabler and it is important to understand not only how a service or product protects our organisation, but how it helps us align with business objectives.

In order to meet these requirements and keep pace with the industry, organisations and companies around the world are investing in independent cyber security researchers as a key component of their cyber security strategy. As organisations accelerate the production of digital assets, extend teleworking and expand their cloud infrastructure, the potential attack surfaces are expanding and evolving daily.

With security powered by hunters, you can tap into their extensive community to put their skills and experience to the test to help protect your digital assets as they evolve.

Here are 5 key points on how CISOs derive value from this type of action:

Reduced time to repair

CISOSs measure the success of their programmes by evaluating Mean time to repair (MTTR), or the amount of time it takes to control and remediate a threat. Securing your own services is a matter of speed. All products have vulnerabilities, and the faster you can find and remediate risks, the more protected your assets will be. Effective security programmes will improve the security efficiency of exposed services. And reduced remediation times demonstrate faster risk reduction.

Spending consolidation

According to McKinsey Digital, the average budget for a security team is around $19 million per year on cybersecurity tools, without being absolutely certain that those tools work. Chances are you are using a set of tools that don’t fit your business, thus paying more for security. And this involves both monetary and time costs. Consolidating costs should mean maximising the impact and efficiency of your effort.

Reducing business risk

The overarching goal of any CISO is risk reduction. However, CISOs struggle to measure something that has not happened, i.e. a breach. In order to measure enterprise risk reduction, security leaders dig deep into the security of their products and examine:

  • How efficiently vulnerabilities are found.
  • How effectively vulnerabilities are prevented.
  • How quickly they move to resolve vulnerabilities.

Each vulnerability discovered can be an indication of an opportunity to improve the software development lifecycle. Understanding vulnerability trends and eliminating them in development allows for more risk reduction and more efficient delivery of secure products.

Staff augmentation

The best-known secret within the security industry is employee burnout. Cybersecurity faces a considerable skills and staffing deficit, regardless of the size of its engineering and security teams. They are often pressed for time and resources as getting a team that has experience and skills in all areas of security is almost impossible. That’s why there is this opportunity to leverage a community of hackers to examine assets with a unique perspective to expose weaknesses. This way, your team uses their time to do what they need to do: remediate risks and fix vulnerabilities.

Define success metrics

Measuring yourself against your competitors helps to ensure you are the best in the industry, and this also extends to security. You can measure success and compare performance across different objectives such as:

  • The number of hackers who have participated.
  • The volume of vulnerabilities reported over time.
  • The time taken to respond to a vulnerability report.
  • The time it takes to resolve the vulnerability.

A CISO must maximise the cost-effectiveness of his security tools; it is his top priority.

For today’s CISO, maximising the cost-effectiveness of their security tools is more important than ever. The speed of development demands an agile solution that grows with your business objectives. With bug bounty programmes like the one offered by Epic Bounties that showcase hacker-driven security, you can harness the power of human intelligence to secure all your assets and services.