Cyber Security Verification

Process driven data security

Overview

Today’s organizational principals face a multitude of challenges.  These challenges include the need to innovate in extremely competitive business climates, address highly dynamic regulatory and compliance challenges, speed returns on investments to counter shrinking budgets and secure the enterprise against a wide variety of evolving sophisticated security threats.  However, unlike other business challenges, organizations typically take a technology-driven approach to securing their infrastructure, when in reality; a business-driven approach is justified. A business-driven approach to security is unlike a technology-centric approach in that the business goals drive the requirements in securing the organization. Organizations often take a bottom-up approach to security because security solution vendors typically promote this approach to their clients. To close identified security gaps, organizations broaden and bolster their defenses by continually building on top of or adding to their existing security investments.  This technology-centric methodology often creates an excessively complex and disjointed security infrastructure.  It becomes difficult to manage and prone to unknown vulnerability gaps, escalates costs and eventually fosters unnecessary operational inefficiencies that inhibit business growth rather than enhance it.  Instead of trying to protect against every conceivable threat, organizations should understand and prioritize the security risk management activities that make the most sense for their organization.  By understanding the level of risk tolerance within an organization, the IT security area can more easily focus on mitigating risks that the organization can’t afford to neglect.  Overemphasizing certain risks leads to wasted resources and efforts, while underemphasizing others may have undesired consequences.  Organizations may find it difficult to achieve a strategic, end-to-end security approach that supports business goals such as driving innovation and reducing organizational costs, as well as operational requirements to address compliance measures and protect against internal and external threats.  We wish to share some actions that an organizations can take to drive security efforts from a business and operational perspective and discusses how we can help enable their success.

Elevate IT security to a business-driven approach

Today’s executives are expected to manage risk in their areas of responsibility in the same way that CFOs manage risks in their domains.  Security risks and the potential impact on IT need to be communicated to executive peers in business terms.  Additionally, they need to align IT security controls with their business processes, monitor and quantify IT risk in business terms, and dynamically drive business-level insight at the executive level.  They need to manage risk and orchestrate security operations in a way that enforces compliance and optimizes business results.  As an organization secures its business processes, a business-driven approach needs to become the guiding influence for ensuring that all the different security domains work together in a holistic and synergistic manner, in alignment with the overarching business objectives; or  the organization’s risk stance becomes vulnerable due to misalignment of priorities between IT and the business strategy.  Aligning IT security with a business-driven approach may also put organizations in a position to have their unique business objectives drive their compliance goals, rather than having compliance drive their business.  Too many organizations invest significant time and money to ensure that they can comply with industry and government regulations, only to find out too late that their key business processes were still vulnerable to attack. Leveraging security management from a business-driven perspective enables them to successfully secure those business processes in a manner that inherently provides the necessary evidence to demonstrate compliance