Enterprise risk management is an important area of business operations that requires careful planning and strategising. Any activity that involves the development, assessment, and improvement of risk management, therefore, comes under the umbrella term, security governance.
As the saying goes, with great power, comes great responsibility. For IT and security teams, security governance is an active responsibility that requires complex coordination across an organisation’s employees, hardware, digital assets and policies.
The ultimate aim, here, is to maintain effective cybersecurity and prevent the one thing any business dreads - a data breach. This, however, needs to be done by carefully considering your corporate practices, requirements, and culture.
This post takes a look at some of the salient elements of security governance and why it’s as important as it is today.
When it comes to cybersecurity, compliance should be far from optional. With research showing that many incidents are long-term, preventable vulnerabilities, instead of dramatic, Mission Impossible-style attacks, sticking to established security policies and guidelines can go a long way in preventing these from materialising into active threats.
In the event that a cybersecurity incident does occur, certain procedures should be in place, regardless of whether you delegate incident response and remedial action to external cybersecurity service providers or internal security teams. Regardless of who is responsible, companies need to make sure that employees are briefed and trained on basic remedial measures in the event the unthinkable happens.
Certain companies may even document these processes and procedures to ensure these resources are on-hand for easy reference and future training.
Another reason why security governance is so important for your company is because it ensures that your systems and policies address every threat systematically and consistently.
What we’ve often seen is that companies acquire and install solution after solution targeted at specific attacks, instead of adopting a bird’s eye view of cybersecurity and rolling out a coordinated system that addresses every threat from every angle.
This is one mistake that can severely compromise your defences because you run the risk of seeing what you’re missing - especially if you’ve employed a spate of different software, without a proper strategy.
With effective security governance in place, you coordinate cybersecurity efforts across your entire organisation and ensure that everyone is on the same page in terms of the tools used and which procedures need to be followed.
Another undeniable benefit of ensuring effective security governance is that it further defines business goals, incorporating cybersecurity to lead to successful outcomes.
This is a value-addition inherent to the process of coming up with a security governance policy, beginning with understanding your organisation’s risk culture, which refers to the risks you face as part of your business activities or those that are common to businesses in your industry and the risks you take as part of your day-to-day activity.
This helps you develop a well-defined security policy, which guides security operations and activity.
With security spending increasing across business entities, there is now a great requirement for outcome-based progress reports. This, ultimately, feeds into a company’s strategic vision, helping them grow without the fear of cyber threats and crimes.
What we’re trying to convey with this post is that security governance = cybersecurity. Regardless of how sophisticated your software or systems are, if you fail to tie these separate elements together in a way that address existing vulnerabilities and threats, they’re not as effective as you think they are.
At Triskele Labs, this is one area we specialise in.