Business Function Mapping: How To Effectively Align IT And Cybersecurity With Business Priorities
In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations face the ongoing challenge of aligning their IT and cybersecurity efforts with their business priorities. The crux of this challenge lies in understanding how your infrastructure supports your business's core functions. Without this understanding, prioritizing cybersecurity initiatives, managing vulnerabilities, and ensuring business continuity remains an uphill battle.
What is business function mapping?
Before diving into the details, it's essential to understand what a business function is. Every organization consists of a collection of business services or functions—these are the core activities that keep the organization running smoothly and generating revenue. For instance, in a retail company, logistics and shipping is likely a critical business function.
Business function mapping is the process of identifying and associating IT assets with the business functions they enable. Instead of grouping assets by their IT characteristics, such as "Windows servers," business function mapping focuses on how these assets support business-centric functions like "servers that support shipping and logistics."
The importance of business function mapping
Understanding which assets are necessary to provide critical business functions provides multiple benefits.
Vulnerability Management: Prioritize remediation efforts based on the criticality of the business function an asset supports.
Patch Management: Prioritize patching assets that are integral to critical business functions over non-critical assets.
Risk Management: More accurately assess and manage risks by understanding the business impact of an asset being compromised or otherwise unavailable.
Asset Management: Maintain a clear understanding of how assets contribute to business functions, ensuring they are managed accordingly.
Attack Surface Management: Identify and protect the most critical attack surfaces based on business function dependencies.
Incident Response: Understanding which assets are necessary to provide critical business functions is crucial to creating response plans that prioritize protecting core business functions, enabling rapid decision-making and targeted actions to contain and mitigate incidents.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Ensure that recovery plans are capable of accurately restoring critical business functions first by understanding exactly which assets provide those functions.
Business function mapping-based prioritization improves not only how IT and cybersecurity deployments are planned and executed but also how their effectiveness is reported and understood by business stakeholders. Moreover, it enhances an organization’s cyber resilience and its ability to recover from outages swiftly.
How Redjack approaches business function mapping
Deploy Sensors: Redjack deploys sensors across your cloud, hybrid, on-premises, and container environments. Their deployment is both lightweight and cost-effective, ensuring minimal disruption to operations.
Collect Communications Data: Redjack sensors are designed to be massively scalable, capable of analyzing up to 2 petabytes of data per second, capturing business interactions seamlessly.
Identify Assets and Dependencies: The collected data is analyzed to identify all assets within the infrastructure, including previously unknown assets. Connections between assets are also identified, based on communications patterns, forming a comprehensive map of asset dependencies. Similarly, we give you visibility into your connections with external, third-party assets, backed by verifiable data.
Business Function Mapping: Redjack uses communication patterns and data science to automatically identify assets that are part of the same business function.
For an example of how this works, a multinational retail corporation using Redjack discovered that the infrastructure supporting their payroll system was over 15X larger than previously known. Their existing inventory had been manually compiled and, according to the information in that inventory, the payroll system consisted of 24 systems. Redjack sensors in the environment collected communications metadata flowing between those assets and the wider environment. The Redjack platform quickly determined that the payroll function was actually comprised of around 400 core systems, with another 2,500 systems that communicated with payroll systems but were not considered a part of the core business function.
In the end, by using Redjack, the customer was not only able to build a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan but to run tests that verified that functions could be brought back online in 15 minutes or less. This plan saves the company from potentially millions of dollars of lost revenue, fines, and other monetary damages, not to mention the significant non-monetary impact.
How Redjack outperforms other solutions
Focus on business functions
Redjack's approach to asset mapping stands out because it focuses on business functions rather than IT functions. While this might seem like a basic principle, many solutions still categorize assets by their IT characteristics, such as "Windows servers," rather than the specific business functions they support, like "payroll servers." This IT-centric approach can create a disconnect between IT and cybersecurity efforts and business needs, leading to misaligned priorities and inefficient resource allocation.
Automated
Redjack's mapping process is automated, eliminating the need for expensive consultants or time-consuming manual surveys. Unlike other solutions that require you to manually map your assets to business functions, Redjack uses advanced data science techniques to identify and map assets directly to the business functions they support, ensuring a more accurate and actionable outcome.
Continuously updated
Legacy asset inventory solutions often rely on consultants to comb through your network or conduct staff surveys to identify assets. These manual efforts are not only costly but also represent a static snapshot in time, failing to account for the dynamic nature of modern IT environments. Redjack continuously analyzes communication patterns within your network to automatically identify interconnected assets and trace the web of dependencies that support critical business functions. This real-time, automated approach ensures that your asset map is always up-to-date.
Results backed with data-driven proof
Redjack's asset mapping is grounded in data-driven proof, not assumptions. Other solutions may rely on employee surveys to determine which assets support which business functions, leading to inaccuracies. Sometimes, assets are categorized based on who purchased them or which department pays for their upkeep, which doesn’t necessarily reflect their actual role in supporting business operations. Redjack eliminates this uncertainty by using concrete, verifiable data to map assets to business functions. If the mapping is ever questioned, Redjack provides clear evidence by showing the connections between assets and their behavior within the network. This level of transparency and accuracy is unmatched by solutions that depend on subjective assessments or outdated data.
Benefits of Redjack’s unique approach
Accurate Third-Party Risk Identification: Since it analyzes communications data, Redjack is able to identify all third-party systems that communicate with systems in your environment, surfacing risks you might not have known existed.
Asset Prioritization Based on Resilience and Criticality: Redjack scores assets based on their resilience (how difficult they are to compromise) and criticality (their importance to business functions). This scoring allows organizations to prioritize assets that need the most attention.
Cyber Resilience and BCDR Planning: Redjack’s mapping capabilities enhance business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning. Knowing the connections between assets allows for better planning and quicker recovery in case of an outage.
The Redjack advantage
The Redjack cyber resilience platform offers a revolutionary approach to solving the prioritization problem in IT and cybersecurity. By focusing on business functions rather than IT characteristics, Redjack ensures that your cybersecurity efforts are aligned with your business priorities, improving resilience, and enabling faster recovery. Whether you're looking to enhance vulnerability management, streamline incident response, or improve your overall risk management strategy, Redjack’s data-driven approach to business function mapping provides a clear advantage.
Contact us to learn how Redjack has been helping the CISOs of the world's largest corporations and government agencies improve their cyber resilience.
