In today’s threat landscape, cybersecurity is no longer a tick-box exercise. It should be as integral to your business strategy as reliable internet or power.
With the digital environment evolving rapidly, and new threat actors and techniques emerging all the time, cyber risk is no longer a matter of if, but when. In 2024, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. How prepared you are when it happens makes all the difference.
Understanding your organisation’s current security posture is crucial. This refers to your ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats. Benchmarking helps demonstrate ROI on cyber defence spend and highlights areas that need additional focus to strengthen resilience and stay ahead of evolving threats.
Why Benchmark Your Security Posture?
Security benchmarks are developed from real-world scenarios and guidance. They allow organisations to take a strategic, proactive approach to closing the gaps that attackers exploit.
● Identify Gaps Before Attackers Do
A thorough assessment shines a light on vulnerabilities in your systems, processes, or policies. Organisations that regularly evaluate their security posture are far less likely to experience major security incidents. Knowing your weak points in advance guides investment, improves detection, and speeds up breach response.
● Measure Against Best Practices
Cybersecurity is constantly evolving. Frameworks such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework (CSF), the NCSC’s Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF), and ISO/IEC 27001 support structured defence and response. Aligning with these best practices builds confidence among executives, customers, and partners that you take security seriously.
● Improve Resilience and Compliance
The goal of benchmarking is to improve cyber resilience: your ability to prevent, withstand, and recover from attacks. This means fewer incidents, and when they do occur, less damage. It also helps identify compliance gaps and reduce regulatory risk, especially in industries facing growing scrutiny.
Key Components of a Security Posture Benchmark in 2025
Benchmarking requires a comprehensive, multi-faceted review of your organization’s people, processes, and technology. This includes both technical configurations and non-technical elements such as policies and staff training.
● Establish a Framework or Criteria
Decide how you will measure your posture and choose an appropriate benchmark. Common choices include:
- Incident Response: NIST CSF (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover)
- Endpoint Hardening: Centre for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks
- Overall Business Risk and Management: NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework
You can assign maturity levels or scores to each area of security using one or a blend of these frameworks.
● Inventory Your Assets and Assess Risks
A strong benchmark starts with knowing what you’re protecting. This includes hardware, software, cloud services, user accounts, and third-party integrations. Classify them by criticality, then assess the risks to those assets.
Use scenarios such as ransomware on a key server, an employee account compromise, or a vendor-based supply chain breach to evaluate how well your current controls and response measures hold up.
● Evaluate Policies and Best Practices
Security posture isn’t just about technology. It’s also about governance, culture, and people. Leaders should ask:
- Are users aware of and following our policies?
- Is technology configured to make secure behaviour the default?
- Do staff feel empowered to report suspicious activity?
Policies and controls only work if people understand and engage with them. Security awareness training must reflect real-world threats and give staff the confidence to act quickly and appropriately.
● Audit Technical Configurations
At the technical core, assess how critical systems are configured. In 2025, cloud and identity require particular attention. Misconfigurations in cloud services, such as overly broad permissions, unsecured storage, or unmonitored third-party access, remain a leading cause of breaches.
These systems often protect your business’s most sensitive assets, so robust auditing of user access, configuration changes, and data transfers is essential. This assessment should also cover firewalls, endpoint agents, network devices, and any other infrastructure critical to your operations.
● Score and Benchmark Against Standards
Once data is gathered, compare your findings against an objective standard or peer group. Use a scoring matrix to assign risk and maturity levels across domains. This helps translate technical findings into clear, measurable metrics that non-technical stakeholders can understand and track over time.
Turning Benchmarks into Better Security
The most important outcome of any cyber security posture benchmarking is the action plan. Results should inform medium and long-term improvements. These could include investing in new security tools, refining policies, or upskilling staff.
This isn’t a one-time exercise. Threats in 2025 continue to evolve. Emerging risks such as AI-generated phishing and deepfakes are reshaping the threat landscape. A strong posture today may not be sufficient tomorrow.
Ready to Benchmark Your Cyber Security Posture?
With CREST-accredited expertise and our 24/7 Glasgow-based Security Operations Centre, Acumen Cyber helps organisations benchmark, strengthen, and continuously improve their cybersecurity posture.
Whether you're just getting started or refining a mature strategy, our tailored assessment process can help you identify gaps, build resilience, and demonstrate value to stakeholders.
Book your assessment or arrange a consultation with our team today.