Cybersecurity Maturity Models and SWOT Analysis

Abstract

Digital transformation has become an integral part of everyday life. With innovative digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing and Services, Industrial Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and others, industrial, public, and private organizations face challenges and pressure in adapting their business models, processes, procedures, services, and others to the digital reality. In this regard, digitization is becoming the engine of far-reaching digital transformation that encompasses and changes all organizations, from business to society. For digital transformation, it is particularly characteristic that it not only influences production in industry, but also the entire corporate organization, their corporate culture, and the conditions of employees’ work in the organization. Therefore, digital transformation needs, besides pure digital technologies, maturity of skills for their successful usage, which requires skilled executives and employees. Thus, maturity in digital transformation enables organizations to reveal its transformative power due to resultant new and innovative business models, products, services, and others, which exert enormous pressure on traditional business models. However, complexity and connectivity in digital transformations have a negative side effect through cybercriminals’ attack possibilities, which make maturity in cybersecurity awareness one of the most important topics. Cybersecurity requires a cybersecurity plan or strategy of organizations because cybersecurity spans many areas, including, but not limited to, data security, information security, operational security, and others. Nevertheless, the enormous changes of digitization require methods enabling mapping organizations current state of their cybersecurity awareness and/or cybersecurity strategy, to defend cyber-criminal attacks. Therefore, measures required are quantifying the actual state in cybersecurity awareness and/or cybersecurity defense strategy to identify the essential actions to achieve a target state in cybersecurity. This is where cybersecurity Maturity Models come into play. Cybersecurity maturity models describe an anticipated desired or necessary development path of criteria in consecutive discrete ranks, starting with an initial state of zero up to a complete cybersecurity maturity level, e.g., five. Therefore, the Maturity Model is a suitable methodology for the systematic development and gradual improvement of skills, processes, structures, and further essential conditions to organizations in the context of cybersecurity awareness and—defense strategy. The prerequisite for this is that the characteristics of the individual maturity development stages be clearly defined beforehand, so user(s) get an overview of what actually is necessary to achieve the next maturity level. This is precisely why cybersecurity maturity models are a suitable instrument that enables management to recognize the necessary changes in organizations and to approach the transformation process in a structured manner. Besides the cybersecurity maturity model, another method is available, recording the economic and technical initial situation in an organization, the Strength-Weakness-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analysis. SWOT is a pragmatic approach capturing the current state of specific and relevant organizational characteristics, to initiate further improvement. This is the case for existing omission in the IT area, insufficient implementation of digital technologies, and others. In this context, considering the internal and external impact on organizations is an important issue, archived through the SWOT analysis. In this context, Chap. 7 introduces in Sect. 7.1 Cybersecurity Maturity Models and SWOT Analysis from a general perspective. Section 7.2 refers to Maturity Index and Maturity Models, Sect. 7.2.1 Maturity Index, and Sect. 7.2.2 Maturity Models, and all their different approaches are considered. Section 7.2 focusses on Maturity Models after ISO 9004:2008. In Sect. 7.2.3, the focus lies on Cybersecurity Models, followed by Sect. 7.4 with the topic Cybersecurity Maturity Best Practice Model. In Sect. 7.5, the SWOT Analysis method is introduced from a general perspective, whereby Sect. 7.5.1 focusses on SWOT Best Practice Analysis, and Sect. 7.5.2 refers to a SWOT Company Analysis, while Sect. 7.5.2.2 shows a SWOT Cybersecurity Analysis. Section 7.6 contains comprehensive questions from the topics Cybersecurity Maturity Models and SWOT Analysis, followed by section “References”, which covers references for further reading.