The Identify function provides the necessary tools, guidelines and best practices to provide organizations with an understanding of cyber security risk to their assets, capabilities, data and people. A thorough understanding of its own assets, business environment, policies, vulnerabilities and risk tolerances also enables an organization to focus and prioritize its risk management and cybersecurity efforts in the short, medium and long term.

The Protect function within the MAXX Compliance Framework focuses on safeguarding your assets, data, and people. Our goal is to implement the necessary measures to protect critical infrastructure, ensure their resilience, and maintain uninterrupted business services. Our safeguards encompass Identity and Access Management (IAM), staff awareness training, and processes relating to information security, data security, and remote maintenance. Equally crucial, the Protect function provides guidelines and processes to mitigate potential cybersecurity events and minimize their impact if they do occur. Trust us to keep your digital ecosystem secure and resilient.

This Detect function defines how an organization can identify a cybersecurity event. This is key to taking action that mitigates its impact. Here, the organization should implement processes to discover and identify (and where required, categorize) anomalies and outliers, while also understanding their potential impact. It’s also important to implement continuous security monitoring. Firstly to ensure that detection happens consistently and without interruptions, and secondly, to verify the effectiveness of current protective measures.

A framework that effectively identifies and detects anomalous events, but fails to respond to them appropriately or on time, is inadequate. The Respond function includes the activities required to take action in case of a cybersecurity event. This is therefore designed to contain its impact. These activities include response planning and execution, event analysis, communications with internal and external stakeholders, event mitigation, and ongoing learning and improvements.

Since the MAXX Compliance Cybersecurity framework is a set of recommendations, not a prescriptive or foolproof solution, it cannot guarantee complete cybersecurity. A quick Google search for ‘recent cybersecurity events’ will prove the need for cybersecurity that’s proactive and ongoing. And this is what a framework provides. It also provides ideas on what an organization can do if it is the victim of a cyber event. It supports timely recovery to restore processes, systems and assets, and thus reduce an event’s impact. In the long term, the Recover function also identifies the activities that can promote organizational resilience. This is attained through robust communications, planning, reviews and training.