It is hard to argue that reliable protection of information assets and technologies plays an important role in the daily activities of any company. That’s what EXCUBE, a French company specialized in cybersecurity, actually does, ensuring a trouble-free presence of its customers on the web. And we are very pleased to know that our Gantt component has become an integral part of the AugmentedCISO project.
In this article, we show how the EXCUBE team uses the DHTMLX Gantt library to achieve a successful visual representation of recurring tasks within its product AugmentedCISO.
Presentation of AugmentedCISO
AugmentedCISO is an innovative solution designed by CISO, for CISO (Chief Information Security Officer). More than a piece of software, it constitutes the digital skeleton of CISO.
It is the first solution dedicated to CISO, that will help and guide them in the monitoring of cybersecurity. It is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product, adaptable and collaborative.
The goal is simple and ambitious: accompany the CISO in its cybersecurity monitoring tasks. With AugmentedCISO, the CISO will improve:
- The efficiency of its activities by a daily gain of time
- The visibility on the security posture and the evolution of cyber-risks
- The consistency between strategy and operations of security
The main innovations of AugmentedCISO are the following:
- The product is entirely dedicated to CISO: ergonomic and adapted to stakes of cybersecurity
- Security measures have been modeled so that policies, measures, and indicators are tightly coupled
- Complex organizations can be handled with perimeters and groupings, which allows the CISO to have a clear view of cybersecurity by entity, subsidiary, etc.
Here are some use cases of AugmentedCISO:
- Evaluate security measures efficiency with strategic and operation dashboards and runbooks
- Evaluate the security posture of the company
- Measure the impact of ongoing projects on risks
- Monitor and control complex security programs and visualize their impacts on risks and conformity
- Record and track tasks (recurring or not) relating to cybersecurity management
Runbooks
In this article, we will have a closer look at one feature of AugmentedCISO — runbooks.
A runbook is a set of tasks that must be done and proofed at a given periodicity (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) to ensure that security measures are efficient. The challenge is to build an efficient visual representation of the tasks, each task having an owner, many “proofs” with state (done, not done) and due date. The view’s objective is to allow the CISO to overview the tasks and quickly see what needs to be addressed, but for higher level management, we also need summaries to be shown (i.e. the number of tasks in a certain amount of time).
Furthermore, the CISO needs to have an overview of the workload induced by the tasks, by user/team, over time.
We already use the DHTMLX Gantt library to show projects and non-recurring tasks in another part of AugmentedCISO, and given the large possibilities offered by the library, we decided to use it to achieve this specific goal.
For the main part of the view (showing the tasks and their proofs), we use a custom layout, and for each task we place the required number of badges (one per proof), coloured according to its state and placed in time according to its due date. Depending on the selected time scale, there can be multiple proofs in a time period, in this case we choose to display the number of proofs, coloured with the colour of the worst task in terms of status (not realized and late, not realized, not done, done, in the future).
A click on a proof allows the user to edit it: mark as done/undone, delete the proof, change comment/assignee and upload files. For the summary part (two lines at the bottom), we use “resource” type of layers, and we compute the number of tasks as well as the sum of their workload.
The workload view also uses a “resource” type of layers, to display the sum of workloads for each user/time, for each time period.
That’s how key features of DHTMLX Gantt help security officers to manage recurring tasks and estimate the workload.
Many thanks to the AugmentedCISO team for choosing our HTML5 Gantt chart for their platform and providing this amazing story. If DHTMLX products helped you in achieving your business goals, share with us your success story right here, and get some goodies from our team.