Why Service Organizations Need More Than Internal Security Reviews

Service organizations spend a significant amount of time and money implementing security programs and controls and performing periodic internal assessments.

Organizations are at ease with their security posture, an IT security officer runs security assessments on a regular basis, and good enough reports are generated.

Unfortunately, no one considers the blind spots of internal security assessments that impact service organizations in ways that the service organizations are unaware of.

The Problems with Assessing Yourself

Internal security assessments inherently lack value because they are performed by the people who built the systems or operate the systems they’re assessing.

Even with the best intentions, teams are biased because they know how the systems should work, and looking at something with an unfamiliar perspective—and more importantly, an outsider’s perspective—may capture edge cases or unique failure situations that otherwise go unnoticed.

In addition, the time spent working with an application creates an inordinate amount of institutional knowledge that can cover up flaws.

What someone may find annoying after a month could be a workaround that’s become second nature to someone who has operated with the application for six months.

Unfortunately, this workaround may not be documented or may not be appropriate for new hires. Regardless, an internal assessment will miss out on such situations, which could represent security vulnerabilities.

What External Assessors Actually See

External assessors glean information that an internal team cannot objectively see. They come in without preconceived notions of how things work, nor do they have any longevity with the systems, which could inadvertently force them not get up and running as a new employee would.

Essentially, they’re looking to get things done like anyone else, without pre-existing notions of how the systems should work.

Furthermore, a professional soc audit goes beyond what an internal assessment can achieve.

An external auditor has worked with so many implementations over their career they know what’s suspected to be the breaking points of standards.

In addition, an external auditor has time on their hands to assess areas that in-house teams may gloss over due to time constraints and to give more than just a plan-scope assessment to meet varying internal priorities.

The Client Relevance

Internal assessments don’t matter to clients or partners. When a prospective customer asks what type of assessment is performed for security controls and an auditor states “we secure ourselves on a regular basis,” it’s a potential deal-killer. External assessments give the credibility that internal assessments cannot.

Enterprise customers in particular will require a validated assessment of your security controls to comply with their own regulatory schemes.

Many enterprise customers will require vendors to submit third-party audit reports during procurement, regardless of how inclusive an internal security assessment was.

If a customer has set policies, internal assessments will never meet such requirements.

The Difference in Degree

Internal assessments review expectations. If someone expects such a system to work in a specific capacity and it does not, an internal assessment will note it as a potential risk area.

However, external auditors come in with the tools that have comprehensive frameworks from which to pull, which allow them to glean information even if it’s not considered an anticipated rating.

External auditors test controls differently as well. An internal assessment may receive credit for showing a control is available and can seemingly be utilized.

An external audit tests whether such a control would detect or deny the attack-type the implementation is looking to achieve. Oftentimes, there are inefficiencies not found documented internally.

Independence is Key

The independent nature of an outside auditor significantly adds value to their security audit. An internal audit must balance operational realities—what’s feasible within budget, what’s politically correct and what’s not—that gets in the way of making recommendations.

An external auditor is only there to recommend without concern for monetary gains of implementation or inter-team politics.

The independence extends to reporting, too. The results of internal security assessments get filtered through management levels before reaching decision makers.

External auditors report directly to leadership so they can focus resources on getting serious situations the attention they need and resources to fix them.

Staying Relevant as Changes Occur

Standards change. Those working within organizations that rely on internal assessments do their best to stay current, but at the end of the day, they’re concerned about day-to-day operations and business-specific needs.

External auditors’ jobs rely upon compliance frameworks and knowing when changes occur. They’re experts in these types of fields, especially when changes and emerging requirements position themselves.

Therefore, as regulations continue to evolve in the industry, an external auditor will know how to accommodate updated schemes; standards will not become antiquated over time which often happens with internal teams who become too familiar with what’s working for them and fail to recognize when other alternatives offer guidance.

The Documentation Advantage

External auditors will assess the assessment and recognize if there’s a documentation process and process in place that has not been documented.

This means that obtaining accreditation will put the security processes into documented formalized forums which work to the advantage of the organization to make sure securities are reproducible, transferrable and projects making them such are scalable.

In addition, formal reporting creates accountability that no one wants to lose from an external source because they often have a timeline to meet for follow-up assessment and verification of new issues that transformed from their findings.

An internal assessment merely notes potential problems and ultimately leaves it up to management to deal with them with little recourse for external auditor follow-up.

Developing Security Maturity

The intention behind having regular external audits makes security maturity developments work better over time than internal assessments. All assessments build upon each other making progression seem absolutely effective.

Auditors can compare you to your peers, note trends since they’ve assessed hundreds before you, and make you aware of potential security risks on the horizon before they even happen.

The expense makes some organizations balk at the idea since they have excess team resources to conduct their own risk reviews.

However, it’s clear from above that a third-party risk review gives access to so much more than what people internally are willing to give for themselves.

Think of external risk reviews like insurance policies that ultimately help your actual risk profile.

They protect blind spots unknown via internal assessments and they give the third-party perspective required through client and partner business ventures going forward.

Internal assessments are great after the fact when continual improvement exists, but as validity, they aren’t good enough for service organizations to secure the best risk profiles possible.