NEEDS EVALUATION
Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment Worksheet
Six questions to turn uncertainty into a practical first step.
For business and IT leaders: review one business-critical service. For each question, mark Known, Partial, or Unknown and identify the evidence you can show.
What should a cybersecurity readiness assessment cover?
A useful starting point is one business-critical service: who owns it, what depends on it, who can access it, what you would notice, how an incident is handled, and whether recovery has been tested. Use evidence for each answer and assign an owner to the highest-impact unknown.
Prepared by Ellihan LLC for U.S. commercial and defense-aligned organizations. This worksheet is educational; use it to define questions and scope rather than as evidence of a completed assessment.
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Cybersecurity Consulting · Compliance and security readiness support
01 / Who owns the risk?
Name the accountable business owner, the service, and the impact of a disruption. Evidence: an owner list and agreed recovery priorities.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
02 / What needs protecting?
List the systems, sensitive data, vendors, and access paths the service depends on. Evidence: an inventory with owners and dependencies.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
03 / Who can get in?
Review MFA coverage, privileged access, and joiner/leaver steps. Evidence: a recent access review and documented exceptions.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
04 / What would you notice?
Confirm which identity, endpoint, and cloud events are collected and who reviews alerts. Evidence: a sample alert with a named responder.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
05 / What happens during an incident?
Identify who makes decisions, who is contacted, and how work continues. Evidence: a response plan and a record of a tabletop discussion.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
06 / Can you restore the service?
Check whether backups are protected and recovery has been tested. Evidence: a restore-test record and documented recovery gaps.
Status: Known / Partial / Unknown Evidence / owner: ____________________
Educational worksheet informed by the NIST CSF. It is not an audit, certification, or complete control assessment.