Cybersecurity Strategy Planning & Research Tools
Customized for Higher Education
Accelerate your strategy planning process with reference data and tools designed to help college and university leaders improve their cybersecurity capabilities
Making cybersecurity data accessible to the higher education community
After over 20 years of leading technology and information security programs in higher education, I know how difficult it can be to find useful data about security solutions used in a university setting.
CampusCISO helps simplify the process of assessing and enhancing your cybersecurity strategy. Members can access a directory of vendor solutions being used across higher education. The site also provides benchmarking data to help compare your program to similar institutions.
You can use this information to learn more about the cybersecurity capabilities your institution needs and identify solutions that can help achieve your goals.
Cybersecurity Capabilities
“Capabilities” form the core of the CYBER HEAT MAP assessment model. The tool groups over 100 cybersecurity technical capabilities into 14 “categories” spread across 3 high-level “functions.”
Capabilities roughly align with the vendor product categories used by trusted review sites, such as Gartner, G2, and others, to describe cybersecurity vendors and products. Rather than treating capabilities as independent topics, CYBER HEAT MAP provides structure to help visualize how the capabilities fit together to create a holistic cyber resilience strategy.
Improvement Recommendations Report
After completing the assessment, CYBER HEAT MAP provides recommendations to help you identify which capability gaps have the most potential to strengthen your overall cybersecurity capabilities.
The review process looks at which capabilities support other capabilities, whether you have solutions in your inventory that could support the capability, whether the capability can support compliance requirements, and more.
Cybersecurity Vendor Solutions Directory
Many assessment models focus on measuring your cybersecurity program using compliance controls. While this can be useful, it also makes it difficult for you to turn these assessment results into an actionable roadmap for future improvements.
CYBER HEAT MAP assessments focus on how cybersecurity solutions fit together to prevent, detect, investigate, and recover from cyber attacks. The online questionnaire helps you identify the people, process, and tools available to achieve each capability’s goals.
CampusCISO includes over 700 vendor solutions that are mapped to the 100+ capabilities. This speeds up completing your technical assessment and helps you research solutions used at other institutions when planning to improve your capability gaps.
Research vendors based on your assessment data
Our tools bridge the gap between compliance assessments and generic vendor reviews by mapping each vendor solution to the CYBER HEAT MAP assessment model. This helps you understand how specific vendors can support your institution’s current and desired cybersecurity improvement goals.
Once you complete the assessment, CYBER HEAT MAP helps you identify gaps in your cybersecurity capabilities and provides recommendations to help prioritize planning for future improvements. Our directory of vendor solutions helps you identify potential tools to help close those gaps.
We built our vendor directory based on requests from customers rather than searching for all potential solutions that are available. (700+ vendor solutions mapped so far!) This means our directory reflects the solutions that other schools actually use in a higher education environment when researching potential vendors.
Compliance Analysis Reports
A common complaint from CIOs and CISOs is that their teams spend too much time completing audits and assessments. CampusCISO helps streamline the process of determining appropriate answers to common assessment frameworks. This saves time for your team and helps establish defensible answers about how your institution meets each control objective.
The Compliance Analysis Report shows how your assessment answers can support controls from some of the more common frameworks used across higher education. This helps streamline your audit process by providing consistent answers. In addition, the CampusCISO saved snapshots allow you to look at historical answers if you need to review your capabilities at a particular point in time.
Compliance Analysis currently supports the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, NIST 800-171, and the National Security Presidential Memorandum 33. We will add more frameworks based on user feedback.
Benchmark Reports
Higher education prides itself on collaboration, data sharing, and the free exchange of information. Despite this, there is a lack of simple and affordable tools to benchmark higher education institutions’ cybersecurity capabilities against peers, research and understand their cyber risk profile, and plan for future information security program enhancements.
CampusCISO is building an extensive database of public data and anonymized CYBER HEAT MAP assessment data to help universities compare their assessments with other institutions.
After completing your assessment, CampusCISO helps you compare your capabilities with other institutions with benchmarking reports. These premium reports are available to all CampusCISO Essential and Advanced subscribers.
Team Skills Inventory and Training Recommendations
CampusCISO™ Advanced members can collaborate with their entire team on the assessment process. Part of this includes an individual “Skills Inventory” that allows team members to indicate their current experience with a capability and their desire to get training to enhance their skills.
The training recommendations reports incorporate capability gaps identified in your CYBER HEAT MAP assessment, and the Skills Inventory data to produce training recommendations. These recommendations can identify opportunities to enhance the skills of your team members in a way that supports improving your highest priority capability gaps.
Join for free to get started!
Join CampusCISO to help build a community that enables college and university leaders to collaborate, share (non-confidential) metrics, and access affordable planning tools.
No account? Register for free today!
CampusCISO Community membership is free for any higher education institution to use.
No credit card required
You must register using a valid university email address