According to a 2019 study on the financial impacts of data breaches, small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) are “acutely” affected, averaging $2.5 million for data breach remediation. According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach report (conducted by the Ponemon Institute), not only has the cost increased year-over-year, data breach events pose a growing risk to SMBs. What’s worse, the financial consequences can be felt for years. Longtail costs – incurred in the second or third year, etc. after the breach –were exponentially higher in regulated industries.
According to a Verizon report, a whopping 43% of small businesses are targeted by cybercriminals. With such a significantly high amount of small businesses targeted, it is in the best interest of SMBs to take proactive measures to secure their IT ecosystems. An organization can start by mapping out their attack surface and completely understanding the threats that may put an organization at risk.
Threat Modeling is becoming more prevalent as organizations evolve as software consumers, evolving their DevOps programs. As advances in technology emerge, so do the threats. Regardless of where the threats come from – bad actors, malicious insiders or by accident – threat modeling is a way that organizations can better understand the threats and vulnerabilities that contribute to risk.
The process of threat modeling may be misunderstood due to the:
- Number of threat modeling methodologies
- Traditional process that was manual and time-consuming
- Ad hoc approach that didn’t lend itself to any one tool
Nonetheless, threat modeling is an important aspect of building secure applications that helps businesses of all sizes. But for some organizations that have never threat modeled before, the biggest concern may be where to start. Most organizations struggle with the beginning of this process. At what point of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) should threat modeling come into play?
This article will prepare small businesses with a basic understanding of why threat modeling plays an important part throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), beginning with the design and planning stages.
What is Threat Modeling?
Threat modeling is a proactive approach to achieving business network, infrastructure and application security that helps businesses to increase security by identifying threats and providing the security controls needed to keep the IT ecosystem as secured as possible. As a continual process, threat modeling provides a complete threat mitigation strategy that takes into account the components, connectors and data flows involved in an organization’s IT infrastructure. From there, users can prioritize security controls based on organization needs.
Learn more about the definition of threat modeling here.
With data security and compliance being one of the most pressing business matters, threat modeling enables IT infrastructure and application development with security built in. As the IT landscape – and corresponding threats – become more complex, security architects and experts must be able to stay updated with the latest technologies and strategies.
ThreatModeler streamlines the threat modeling process with automation and integrations so that even DevOps team members with little-to-no technical know-how can identify and mitigate potential threats. Thanks to ThreatModeler, collaboration between software developers, security experts and senior leaders across the organization is simplified. This collaboration allows organizations to scale threat models across all applications in the IT environment. More on this later.
Benefits of Threat Modeling for SMB
It’s frequently tricky to determine the business risks that come with a liability. Habitually the risks are foggy and don’t precisely connect with the total of consumers involved. When SMBs are creating or developing a new application, security needs to be considered throughout the entire process. Threat modeling is considered the most effective security strategy for small businesses to not only understand their attack surface, but to also inform DevOps teams on the likelihood and impact that a data breach will occur.
Data breaches can make or break a small business. It is well known that small and midsize businesses are particularly susceptible to a cyberattack. Correlatively, 60% of small companies go out of business within six months of a cyberattack.
Luckily for small business owners, threat modeling can help answer questions about their application’s threats, vulnerabilities and risks. Threat modeling enables you to recognize where your business might be susceptible; it’s an approach that encourages an informed conversation about risk mitigation. Implementing threat modeling places an extra layer of security to safeguard your business. Additionally, the results of threat modeling with advanced platforms such as ThreatModeler will yield results that are consistent, repeatable and scalable across an organization.
ThreatModeler Proactive Secures IT Apps, Networks and Systems
ThreatModeler enables organizations to be proactive (plan, implement and prevent) rather than a reactive approach (investigate, remediate, pay steep fines and penalties). Your business will save time, effort and money while making sure your applications and systems are protected with a Threat Library culled from authoritative resources, including CIS, AWS and OWASP.
ThreatModeler is a tool that provides businesses with a holistic view of their attack surface. By helping businesses scale their systems, they can protect themselves from harmful and costly data breaches throughout the entire Agile development process. ThreatModeler not only provides an accurate visualization of the attack surface, it also informs other security processes, such as penetration testing.
ThreatModeler offers data, charts and dashboards that are conducive to analytics, charts and dashboards. The platform, and its proficient customer success team provide quick-start implementation and integration services with dedicated support. To become proactive rather than reactive against cybersecurity threats, learn more about threat modeling as a service by booking a demo to speak to a ThreatModeler expert today.