Cyber Risk Assessments That Find What Others Miss
Most organizations operate under the assumption that their controls are working. Few have independent validation.
Cloudskope performs structured cyber risk assessments that identify where exposure sits, what needs to be fixed, and how to sustain protection over time. We audit deeply, help remediate what matters, and support 24/7 Overwatch for organizations that need lasting resilience.
Renewing cyber insurance? Check your application answers before you sign →
What a Serious Cyber Risk Assessment
Is Built to Uncover
A strong assessment does more than surface issues. It shows where exposure is building, why it matters, and what needs action first.
Control Gaps Hidden by Tool Sprawl
We assess whether overlapping controls are configured correctly, enforced consistently, and reducing risk as intended.
Identity & Privilege Drift
We identify where access, privilege, and authentication pathways have expanded beyond intent and created unnecessary exposure.
Externally Reachable Exposure
We assess what attackers can actually see, reach, and exploit across internet-facing systems and inherited trust paths.
Recovery Assumptions That Fail Under Pressure
We evaluate whether backup, continuity, and incident response plans will hold up under real operational stress.
Third-Party Risk Blind Spots
We identify where vendors, integrations, and service providers introduce exposure your internal teams may not fully control.
Leadership Reporting Without Validation
We assess whether executive reporting reflects validated exposure, not inherited dashboards, assumptions, or compliance language.
What This Engagement Covers
A serious cyber risk assessment does more than list issues. It examines the systems, decisions, controls, and dependencies that determine whether your organization is actually protected.
Environment Discovery & Exposure Mapping
A structured baseline of your environment, attack surface, and inherited trust relationships.
Infrastructure, cloud services, identity systems, SaaS platforms, endpoints, external exposure, and high-trust integrations.
You cannot protect what you do not fully understand. Most organizations have more exposure than their documentation suggests.
Environment Baseline
External Exposure Map
Trust Relationships
High Risk Asset Summary
Priority Review Areas
Control Validation & Configuration Review
Independent validation of whether deployed controls are actually reducing risk.
Control design, configuration state, enforcement logic, policy alignment, tuning quality, and overlap across tools and teams.
Most risk persists not because tools are missing, but because the controls already in place are incomplete, misconfigured, or poorly aligned.
Control Validation Matrix
Configuration Findings
Coverage Gap Summary
Risk Ranked Weaknesses
Identity, Access & Privilege Analysis
A focused review of how access is granted, escalated, governed, and revoked across the environment.
A focused review of how access is granted, escalated, governed, and revoked across the environment.
Identity is one of the most important control planes in the enterprise. Access failures often create the fastest path to material exposure.
Privilege Risk Summary
Access Drift Analysis
MFA & Authentication
Role Governance Findings
Privileged Account Compromise Analysis
Technical Assessment & Pentest
Technical validation of weaknesses that could be reached, exploited, or chained together under realistic attack conditions.
Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed services, insecure workflows, internal dependencies, and practical attack paths across priority systems.
Not every finding matters equally. What matters is what is reachable, exploitable, and capable of causing business consequence.
Technical Gaps
Attack Path Observations
Exposure Ranking
Validation Notes
Priority Remediation List
Resilience, BCP & Incident Readiness
An operational review of your ability to recover, respond, and maintain continuity when controls fail.
Backup and recovery assumptions, incident escalation pathways, continuity plans, decision authority, tabletop readiness, and operational resilience gaps.
Resilience determines whether an incident becomes a contained event or a business crisis.
Continuity Readiness Review
Recovery Capability Observations
Escalation Gap Summary
Tabletop Recommendations
Priority Issues
Remediation Roadmap & SOC Transition
A structured plan for fixing what matters and sustaining protection after the audit.
Remediation feasibility, internal ownership, sequencing constraints, governance needs, monitoring requirements, and where 24/7 Overwatch support is appropriate.
An audit only creates value if issues are fixed and the environment stays protected over time.
Remediation Roadmap
Ownership Matrix
Transition Plan
Executive Action Summary
Governance Recommendations
Independent cybersecurity audit services
A cybersecurity audit answers one question with evidence: are the controls you are paying for actually working? An independent audit is one performed by a firm that did not build or run the environment it is reviewing. Our only job in the engagement is to tell you what is true, including what your current provider missed.
Most organizations already have some form of review. It just is not independent.
An MSP self-assessment is the team that built your environment grading its own work. Even a capable provider has every reason to report that things are fine, and no reason to look for the gaps it created.
A vulnerability scan lists known software flaws on systems it can reach. It does not tell you whether MFA is enforced for every admin, whether someone is already signed in to a mailbox, or whether your backups would restore. Scanners produce volume. An audit decides what matters.
A compliance checklist confirms that a policy exists. An audit checks whether the setting behind the policy is on, everywhere, today.
Independence is also what the people outside your company want to see.
Boards and audit committees need a view of cyber risk that does not come from the team being measured.
Lenders and investors want to know a material exposure will not surface after the money moves.
Cyber insurers treat your application answers as part of the policy. If an answer about MFA, backups or payment call-backs does not hold up after a claim, coverage can be at risk. Our cyber insurance application check shows which answers you can prove today.
Buyers in a sale process will run their own technical review. An independent audit lets you fix issues before a buyer uses them against your valuation.
What the audit covers
Every audit is scoped to your environment, but most cover the same core control areas. In plain terms, we check:
Sign-in and MFA: who can sign in, from where, and whether multi-factor authentication is enforced for every user and every admin, with no quiet exceptions.
Admin and privileged accounts: who holds admin rights, whether they still need them, and whether former staff or vendors still have access.
Email security: whether someone can send email as your company, plus mailbox forwarding, hidden inbox rules and third-party app consents.
Microsoft 365 and cloud settings: tenant configuration, external sharing, conditional access and audit logging.
Laptops and servers: whether endpoint protection is on every device and whether systems are patched and still supported.
What the internet can see: exposed services, remote access paths and forgotten systems.
Network design: whether one infected machine can reach everything else.
Backup and recovery: whether backups are separated from the network they protect and whether a restore has actually been tested.
Logging and monitoring: whether the records you would need after an incident exist and are kept long enough.
Vendors and third parties: which outside providers hold access to your systems and data.
Payment controls: whether a change to bank details or a wire request is verified by a call to a known number before money moves.
Incident readiness: whether there is a response plan, whether people know their roles, and who has authority to act.
Active compromise: whether an attacker is already inside. Most audits never ask. We treat it as the most important question.
How the audit works
1. Scoping call. We agree on what is in scope, who your escalation contacts are, and what the results need to support: a board meeting, an insurance renewal, a sale process or a new IT leader's baseline.
2. Read-only access. Your team grants least-privilege, read-only access. We do not change configurations or disrupt your staff during discovery.
3. Discovery and validation. We map your environment, pull configuration, identity and log data, and test whether each control works as intended. We separate real exposure from background noise, and look for signs of an attacker already inside. If we find active compromise, we escalate to leadership immediately, ahead of any written report.
4. Initial findings. Initial findings are typically available within the first ten business days, depending on complexity and access.
5. Risk ranking. Every finding is ranked by how reachable it is and what it could cost the business, not by how many tools flagged it.
6. Executive readout. We walk leadership through the results in business terms, then hand your technical team the detail they need to act.
Need it faster, with the fixes included? Cloudskope SARTUS™ runs three business days of assessment and three business days of done-for-you remediation for a fixed fee.
What you get at the end
Documents each reader can use without translation:
For the board and owners: an executive readout and summary that states where exposure sits, what is driving it and what needs attention first.
For your IT team or provider: prioritized findings with the evidence behind each one, plus a remediation roadmap that separates quick fixes from longer projects and names an owner for each item.
For insurers, lenders and buyers: an independent record of what was tested and what was found. In a SARTUS™ engagement this takes the form of a consolidated risk register mapped to NIST SP 800-53 and the CIS Benchmarks, with residual-risk analysis and an insurability posture review.
For what comes next: a plan for sustaining protection, including where ongoing monitoring or governance support makes sense and where it does not.
If you want the outside view first, a penetration test and vulnerability assessment shows what an attacker can reach from the internet. The audit then tells you why it is reachable and how to close it.
How much does a cybersecurity audit cost?
Cost follows scope. The main drivers are the number of users and admin accounts, how many cloud tenants, offices and networks are in scope, whether hands-on penetration testing is included, which frameworks the results must map to, and whether you want remediation done inside the engagement or only recommended. SARTUS™ is priced as a fixed fee, so the number does not grow with the hours. We confirm scope and price after a short scoping call.
How often should we have an independent cybersecurity audit?
We suggest at least once a year, and again whenever something material changes: new IT leadership, a new MSP, an acquisition or sale, a cyber insurance renewal with new questions, a move to a new cloud platform, or an incident. Each change adds accounts, settings and exceptions nobody reviews.
What is the difference between a cybersecurity audit, a risk assessment and a penetration test?
A penetration test tries to break in from an attacker's position and proves which weaknesses can be exploited. A risk assessment ranks exposure by likelihood and business impact. An audit checks controls against what they are supposed to do and records the evidence. Our engagement combines all three: we verify the controls, rank the risk and, where in scope, test what is exploitable. Penetration testing can also be scoped on its own.
Is a cybersecurity audit the same as a SOC 2 audit?
No. A SOC 2 report is an attestation issued by a licensed CPA firm for a service organization, usually to give its customers assurance. Our audit is a technical review of your own environment, built to show leadership what is exposed and what to fix. The SARTUS™ risk register is crosswalked to SOC 2, so your assessor can work from the same evidence.
Take card payments? A PCI DSS assessment is a separate standard with its own assessor. Our PCI DSS compliance consulting covers scoping, gap assessment and audit preparation.
Beyond The Audit
A serious cyber risk assessment should not end in a report that sits on a shelf.
It should change how risk is understood, prioritized, funded, and managed.
Clearer View of Exposure
Leadership gains an independent view of where exposure sits, what is driving it, and what requires immediate attention.
Priorities Ranked
Teams know what to fix first, what can wait, and where investment will actually reduce risk.
Spend Rationalized
Budgets align to validated risk rather than vendor pressure, assumptions, or duplicated controls.
Protection Sustained
Where needed, CloudSkope stays engaged through remediation support, governance guidance, and 24/7 Overwatch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the most common questions about scope, process, and what happens after the audit.
