Today, third party cybersecurity assessments and certifications programs for products and services are designed with good intentions – to provide assurances that products and services are implementing security practices and meeting recognized security standards. However, as valuable as these efforts are, they suffer from a critical flaw: they offer only a snapshot in time, not a continuing view of a product’s or service’s security posture. Given the high costs and long timelines for certifications, it’s a fair question to ask if the value justifies the effort.
The answer is no if we continue to rely on traditional methods. The digital landscape evolves rapidly, and a product certified as meeting specific security standards today could have critical vulnerabilities tomorrow do to newly discovered exploits, supply chain compromises, or changes in its operating environment. Replying on static certification in a dynamic environment is like looking at yesterday’s traffic report to plan today’s commute. We shouldn’t settle for this outdated model.
Today, we have tools and processes to continuously govern what we build and to prove its security posture to others in real time, not just at the moment it was certified by a third party. The path forward lies in a fundamental shift from episodic compliance to continuous, verifiable assurance. This means:
- Integrating security into the design and develop environment. Secure development lifecycle methodologies don’t dictate a one size fits all approach, but they do embed security practices throughout the entire development process, from initial design to deployment and beyond.
- Real time telemetry and monitoring.
- Automated remediation and self-healing to not only detect but respond and remediate at machine speed.
- Transparent Reporting that includes data relevant for the governance requirements at the specified period.
This kind of a program can be included in the design, development, and use of products and services. This ensures that assessments and certifications are no longer created as a one-time certificate for the life of the product or as a once-a-year solution.
Sinewave Ventures has invested in this future through companies like RegScale and RunSafe Security. They are on the forefront of this shift. RegScale is purpose-built as the world’s first real-time governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform. The platform allows enterprises to automate the governance and compliance process, providing a real-time view of their adherence to standards, rather than a static report. Meanwhile, RunSafe Security’s technology embeds self-protection directly into the software, making it inherently more resilient against attacks and contributing to automated remediation.
Embracing continuous, verifiable assurance requires a fundamental shift in the way we think about cybersecurity, certification and accreditation, but it promises a future with more secure products and services, reduced long-term costs associated with breaches and compliance cycles and improves trust that a point-in-time snapshot can simply never provide. It is time to move beyond good intentions and build security that keeps pace with the digital world.
