45% of global organizations by 2025 are expected to face a security attack on their supply chain software. With this, the recent data breach at Uber is no surprise, as cyber actors become more and more sophisticated in carrying out their malicious acts.
While creating an infrastructure security plan is not as complex as most business leaders think, you must align it with your business strategy to accommodate environmental as well as technology drivers.
As a security and risk management leader, you need to prioritize your tactical challenges, and create an infrastructure security planning process that supports you from creating a vision to execution.
In this blog, we present a commentary around 5 factors that help you fine-tune critical infrastructure processes for better risk management across the board.
What should your infrastructure security strategy look like?
As a security leader, you should recognize that strategic planning is at the heart of an effective infrastructure security program. As a stepping stone, you can create a consolidated vision for a security strategy that will help you stay on track when prioritizing tasks and analyzing critical procedures. Let’s look into 5 best practices that make your organizational infrastructure resilient and help you keep malicious entities at bay.
Practice #1 – Defining an actionable vision
What do you plan on achieving during a defined period? Does your security strategy have a maturity level? How will you introduce new capabilities and architectures with rapidly changing technology realities?
These are some questions you should be asking yourself when establishing a vision statement for your infrastructure security strategy. Your vision model needs to be backed up by a set of actionable objectives that you must achieve during the execution period.
Developing objectives for your security strategy will require you to understand your business strategy, technology trends, and environmental drivers that directly and indirectly influence critical infrastructure security decisions at your organization.
Practice #2 – Creating the right business strategy
Your business strategy impacts how you plan and execute your security strategy. For most enterprises, the business strategy is a mix of leadership, cost, and service. But how does a combination of these elements actually have value from an IT security standpoint?
As a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of your company, you need to factor in a variety of elements including your company’s market-share growth target, acquisitions, organic growth product expansion, and meetings with relevant executives to chalk out a strategic IT security plan.
Practice #3 – Considering environmental and technology drivers
Different environmental trends create different disruptions in the technology market. These include economical, regulatory, and market-centric elements that can churn up security risks for your enterprise.
On the other hand, as an infrastructure security expert, you should be on the lookout for trending technologies like cloud computing, mobile device management (MDM), blockchain, and zero-trust architectures to feature in your infrastructure security strategy.
Practice #4 – Establishing rigorous reporting procedures
Effective and consistent reporting on your security progress is critical to sustaining organizational resiliency. Adopt a balanced approach that makes the reporting process as honest as possible in order to retain the security leadership team’s confidence. Make sure you understand:
- Which projected advantages were completely or partially realized?
- Which expected outcomes were you unable to achieve?
- What were security challenges and complications on an organizational scale?
Practice #5 – Prioritizing value-added parameters
Businesses need to niche down their security objectives given the resources they currently possess. Here are a few parameters you can consider when prioritizing your security needs:
- The number of resources you can utilize to implement security practices
- The total financial cost of executing your security strategy
- The combined time to value for your projects
Now that you know the 5 best security practices, you can house a resilient and robust organizational infrastructure to help you achieve business goals without having to worry about managing business risks.
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