What is security assessment and what is the difference between security assessment and security audit?
Security assessment is comprehensive review of applications, systems, infrastructure, platforms and services security of an organization. It is mostly conducted on environments that pass through security testing endeavors. Moreover, it is an evaluation process performed on valuable assets with the purpose of finding out the occurrence of security risks and the quality of security process documentation in an organization. In security assessment processes, cybersecurity professionals conduct risk assessment activities to identify and analyze vulnerabilities in the security tested components that may cause compromise to organizational assets. And they recommend remediation mechanisms to the identified vulnerabilities as well.
Security assessment incorporates security testing and scanning tools and goes further beyond automated vulnerability scanning and manual penetration testing activities. Besides, it considers a review of the threat landscape, risks and asset values to the organization. Security assessment may be performed by an internal security team, or organizations may outsource it to third party security assessing teams.
Security assessment procedures may be conducted in one or more of the following security controls and processes:
- Access controls
- Security awareness and training
- Business continuity and disaster recovery planning
- Identification, authentication, authorization and accountability/auditing
- Security configuration management
- Change management
- Incident management plan
- Media protection
- Physical security and environmental controls
- Security governance and program management
- Personnel security
- Supply chain risk management
- Privacy requirements
- More
The main output of the security assessment is a comprehensive report detailing the potential vulnerabilities, security improvement areas and remediation recommendations.