Continuous Assurance
Ensuring continuous protection and proactive threat mitigation across your entire attack surface
Moving confidence in your cyber security from a point in time to all the time
In the era of Assurance 4.0, organisations need continuous assurance that they are effectively managing the changing risks that their businesses face. We know that you require a cycle of services that continuously affirms the scope of your environment to be tested and to understand your remediation requirements.
Our approach to continuous assurance is designed to enable real-time risk management - which means faster resolution of issues, better risk mitigation and less business disruption. We use a continuous threat exposure management methodology delivered by services in our portal, including attack surface management, scenario testing, red teaming and cloud configurations, to keep you continuously aware of cyber incidents and risks.
Our Continuous Assurance Services
Always on assurance
Always-on monitoring and assessment keep your defences robust and up to date.
Real-time detection
Identify cyber security vulnerabilities as they arise.
Adaptability
Quickly adapt to changes in your environment, ensuring comprehensive cyber security coverage.
Human expertise
Expert testers uncover, check and verify complex cyber security vulnerabilities.
Award-winning expertise
Our cyber security team continues to achieve multiple vendor certifications, highly respected industry accreditations and international accolades, demonstrating the breadth, depth and impact of their services.
Benefits of Continuous Assurance Services
We start the Continuous Assurance cycle by manually assessing all attack surfaces for vulnerabilities. Where a new feature has been released or a significant change made, for example within a web application, we will test that too. To complement these human-led penetration testing activities, we spot-check all in-scope systems at least once per month using automated Vulnerability Assessment techniques.
- Proactive security: Stay ahead of potential threats with continuous identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities.
- Increased confidence: Maintain a high level of confidence in your cyber security posture at all times.
- Regulatory compliance: Continuous monitoring and documentation assist in meeting industry regulations and compliance requirements.
Components of Continuous Assurance
Attack Surface Management
Your organisation’s assets and systems constitute your attack surface, the sum of all possible points where an unauthorised user could gain access. Our ASM service continuously identifies, monitors, and reduces your attack surface, ensuring that all potential vulnerabilities are addressed in real-time.
Continuous Penetration Testing
Going beyond traditional penetration testing, our Continuous Penetration Testing combines automated and human-led techniques to provide in-depth security assessments. This ensures that vulnerabilities are identified and addressed promptly, reducing the risk of successful attacks.
Our experts verify the automated findings for accuracy and relevancy and where appropriate, the automated findings are updated. Only then are they released to our clients for review. When you combine the benefits of Attack Surface Management and Continuous Penetration Testing, under our Continuous Assurance Service an ‘always-on’ cycle of assurance is activated.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is traditional assurance?
Traditionally, assurance exercises are conducted at a point in time. For example, a penetration test may be conducted annually, as a spot check for vulnerability levels. Findings may then be remediated, root causes identified, and changes made. However, this only provides strong assurance at that point in time and those assurance levels start to reduce as soon as the activity ends.
What is attack surface management?
Attack Surface Management (commonly abbreviated to ASM) is a proactive cyber security strategy focused on identifying, monitoring and reducing the attack surface of an organisation.
What services constitute a continuous assurance program in cyber security?
As a minimum assurance package, we suggest Attack Surface Management and Continuous Penetration Testing create a cycle of ‘always-on’ Continuous Assurance. This ensures you gain assurance against assets both known and unknown, throughout a year.
Why work with us?
Specialist expertise
Our cyber security experts hold multiple vendor certifications and accreditations as well as highly respected industry accreditations from CREST, the PCI SSC, ISC2, BCI, Chartered Institute of IT, and NCSC CHECK.
Industry leadership
We lead and shape industry on advisory boards and councils including the PCI SSC Global Executive Assessor Roundtable and CREST councils in the Americas, Asia, EMEA and the UK. We are certified by a range of governing bodies including the payment card industry and are approved as a Qualified Security Assessor.
Everywhere you are
Operating in over 55 countries, with more than 250 dedicated cyber security specialists and over 300 highly qualified information security auditors across the world, we can provide a local service with a globally consistent dedication to excellence.
Award winners
We have been recognised for the breadth and depth of our services – including the TEISS Award for Best Penetration Testing Service in 2024, Enterprise Threat Detection and Cloud Security awards at the Security Excellence Awards 2024 and the Stratus Award for Best Managed Cloud Security Service.
The world leader in CREST accreditations
We are proud to be the only organisation in the world with a full suite of accreditations from The Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST).
Our team of consultants have achieved the highest accreditations for Penetration Testing, Red Teaming, Incident Response services and Threat Intelligence. In addition, we were also the first organisation to be CREST accredited for our Security Operation Centre services.
Providing Security Testing to a leading UK financial investment company
This client had previously experienced a high number of vulnerabilities, from which LRQA was able to help. The services implemented provided the client with a proactive and threat-led approach; informed by our offensive and threat intelligence teams to protect against the latest industry threats.
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