The media isn’t short of new breaking stories on how enterprises and organisations have been susceptible to cyber breaches resulting in loss of operational time, costs and or fines.
Despite the continued news around Cyber Security breaches and risks to organisations, they keep on happening.
Creating and maintaining a strong security posture is critical to keeping IT operations running smoothly and mitigating additional unexpected and unknown costs of downtime.
We believe the three key pillars to ensuring Security Strategy success are:
- Ensure everyone is on-board
Ensuring full organisational buy-in to the security strategy and the importance of it is key. This means ensuring that it is on the agenda of the board meeting to periodically review the strategy and that the board and its senior team are supportive of the resource required to deploy and maintain the strategy. The wider organisation need to be included in the buy-in too. For example, the IT team should be included and on board with the strategy objectives.
- Audit and document all of your IT use
Although this may seem a simple and laborious task. Documenting all IT use across the organisation including all software, apps and mobile devices is critical to the success of the strategy because you need to know where your data is and what the risks are. There are applications which can help with this auditing but interacting with users is important. Often departments or users use shortcuts to enterprise systems and storage and use their own because its easier. For example, using WeTransfer, free Google accounts, basic Dropbox or storing notes on their Apple iCloud. This is called Shadow IT. It is important to document the unofficial applications as well as the official ones.
- Consider using outside resources
Outside resources can help to support designing and maintaining security strategy. It’s not necessary to outsource the complete project, as that could cause internal resentment. However, a security consultant’s skills and knowledge provide critical expertise and experience, as their familiarity with a range of organisational security needs and challenges can help speed up the project and ensure organisation-specific considerations are not overlooked.
Please don't hesitate to contact us to discuss how we can help implement your security strategy in more detail.