CMMC Requirement RA.L3-3.11.5E – Security Solutions Effectiveness: Assess the effectiveness of security solutions at least annually or upon receipt of relevant cyber threat information, or in response to a relevant cyber incident, to address anticipated risk to organizational systems and the organization based on current and accumulated threat intelligence.
Links to Publicly Available Resources – Coming Soon
This NIST Special Publication provides guidance for conducting risk assessments.
Threat awareness and risk assessment of the organization are dynamic, continuous, and inform system operations, security requirements for the system, and the security solutions employed to meet those requirements. Threat intelligence (i.e., threat information that has been aggregated, transformed, analyzed, interpreted, or enriched to help provide the necessary context for decision making) is infused into the risk assessment processes and information security operations of the organization to identify any changes required to address the dynamic threat environment.
[NIST SP 800-30] provides guidance on risk assessments, threat assessments, and risk analyses.
Further Discussion
This requirement requires the organization to analyze threat intelligence and consider the effectiveness of currently deployed cybersecurity solutions against existing, new, and emerging threats. The goal is to understand the risk to the systems and the organization based on threat intelligence and to make adjustments to security solutions to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. Analysis of solutions should include analysis of operational system settings of the deployed systems and not be solely a conceptual capability analysis. This analysis includes verifying configuration settings are configured as desired by the organization and have not been changed over time.
Threat information can be thought of as raw data that may be limited in terms of evaluating the effectiveness of controls across the enterprise. For example, knowledge of a threat that has not been correlated with other threats may result in evaluation of an implementation that only provides partial protection for one set of systems when, in fact, the emerging threat is applicable to the entire enterprise. Large organizations may also have the resources to aggregate, transform, analyze, correlate, interpret, and enrich information to support decision-making about adequacy of existing security mechanisms and methods.