As of this week, Kaspersky is offering Cyber Risk Heatmap, a free self-assessment that, after a roughly 10-minute questionnaire, shows a company which of six security areas carries the most potential risk, including cloud and workloads. The tool, announced on October 19, 2026, generates a heat map, an overall score, and a PDF report with recommendations, although the company itself warns that it does not replace a technical audit.
Kaspersky’s Cyber Risk Heatmap in 30 seconds
- It’s a free online questionnaire that takes about 10 minutes to complete.
- It assesses people and endpoints, email and network, cloud and workloads, attack surface, monitoring and investigation, and incident management.
- It returns an area-by-area heat map, an overall score, and a PDF report with recommendations.
- Kaspersky doesn’t disclose how it calculates the score or which reference framework it uses.
- It doesn’t replace a penetration test or a vulnerability assessment.
For a systems or infrastructure manager, the appeal lies in getting an initial, organized snapshot of where the organization is weakest before deciding where to invest. In environments increasingly split between in-house data centers, private cloud, and public cloud services, it isn’t always clear which area is worst off, and an exercise like this can help open that conversation with management or with a vendor.
Six Areas, From Employees to Incident Response
The questionnaire divides company security into six blocks. Two have to do with day-to-day exposure: people and their devices, and email and network, where much of the phishing comes through. Two more look at infrastructure: cloud and workloads, and attack surface, meaning what the organization leaves visible to the internet. The last two focus on response capability: monitoring and investigation of suspicious activity, and incident management once something has already happened.
Based on the answers, the tool draws a customized heat map showing the potential risk level of each area and an overall score, and delivers a free PDF report with findings and practical recommendations. Kaspersky doesn’t detail how it weighs each answer or whether it follows frameworks like the NIST CSF or MITRE ATT&CK, so the score is more useful for comparing areas within the same company than for benchmarking against others.
What a Questionnaire Can’t Measure
Kaspersky is explicit about the limits: the Cyber Risk Heatmap is a high-level assessment and doesn’t replace penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, compromise assessments, or detailed audits. The difference matters most on the infrastructure side. A questionnaire captures what a company says it has — backups, network segmentation, or centralized logging, for example — but it doesn’t check whether those backups actually restore, whether segmentation is properly applied, or whether anyone reviews the logs.
That’s why it’s best to treat the result as a list of priorities, not a certificate. Organizations subject to NIS2, the European cybersecurity directive that requires looking beyond the firewall, will in any case need more formal, documented risk assessments than a ten-minute self-assessment.
It’s also worth keeping in mind who’s behind the tool: a vendor that sells products covering those same six areas, such as its Next lineup, which it recently expanded with modules for SMEs. It’s reasonable to cross-check the report’s recommendations against other sources before making purchasing decisions.
Yana Shevchenko, Kaspersky’s corporate product marketing lead, sums it up this way: “Stronger cybersecurity starts with knowing where to focus.” Specialist outlet opensecurity.es has also reviewed what the Cyber Risk Heatmap does and doesn’t offer.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Kaspersky’s Cyber Risk Heatmap?
It’s a free online self-assessment that, through a roughly 10-minute questionnaire, shows a company’s potential risk across six cybersecurity areas.
Does it assess cloud security?
Yes, cloud and workloads is one of the six areas, alongside endpoints, email and network, attack surface, monitoring, and incident management.
Does it help with NIS2 compliance?
Not on its own. It’s a high-level assessment, and Kaspersky warns that it doesn’t replace audits or detailed technical analysis.
What do you get at the end?
An area-by-area heat map, an overall risk score, and a free PDF report with findings and recommendations.
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