In the contemporary world, the issue of information security is one of the most important subjects that worry the modern business owners. This problem is relevant to every organization regardless of its size, origin, and what products or services it deals with. Being a universally applied concept, information security is approached differently by the organizations depending on their structure, functions, and operations. As a result, information security is achieved only when the company’s individual and unique requirements concerning the security practices are met.
Information Security Scenario and Simulation
During the activities of the course focusing on the organizational needs for information security, the tasks had a list of main assumptions. First of all, it was assumed that the contemporary companies rely on digital technologies and therefore, are in need for information security practices protecting their data from external and internal threats. Secondly, the activities assumed that a modern company includes a range of diverse departments that perform different tasks and that way, generate large amounts of versatile data every day.
Working on the case, it was assumed that to ensure the protection of information the companies would establish their own security systems that, in many cases, would complicate the working process of the employees and make the process of data extraction or access lengthy, frustrating, and tedious. Thirdly, based on the fact that the companies tend to manage their information security on some level, the team was to assume which practices were the most likely to be in place and base the future efforts and planning on this knowledge.
These assumptions cannot be referred to as “artificial” because they are generally suitable for a variety of real-life situations and reflect the environments the information security teams may face during their actual practice. The case of Vology represents a common situation in a company of modern days when the security concerns are becoming more real as the technologies advance. The negative experience of many businesses that is connected to their reliance on the outdated or inefficient software and the need for the optimization of the resource and operations management systems is a situation an information security team today has to handle on the regular basis.
Information Security Team’s Work in the Eyes of Senior Staff
As a senior staff member in Vology, I would view the work of the information security team as extremely useful as its main purpose was to manage the possible threats for the company and ensure the continuity of the business. Information is one of the most valuable resources of the contemporary businesses, and that is why it is crucial that the organizations make sure that it is protected, which creates a necessity that the information security procedures are added to the corporate governance structure (Pironti, 2006). The services of the information security team provided Vology with the data collected from the monitoring of the security systems in place and the valuable consultancies as to what their strengths and weaknesses are and what could be done for their improvement.
The services of the information security team hired by Vology allowed to company to raise its cost-efficiency and trustworthiness (Benefits of Information Security Monitoring, 2012). The latter quality is valuable for the clients of Vology as well because they are interested in doing business with a reliable partner protected from the security breaches that could make a negative impact on the clients revealing the private information about their interactions.
The best way to evaluate the efficiency of the renewed security systems for the senior staff of Vology is by paying attention to the presence of security threats detected and addressed by the system or breaches. If the new system could not protect the data from certain threats, it is clearly a failure. In addition, in the case of Vology, the information security team was to address the issue of the integration of the new system in the working process of both the IT team responsible for security matters and the back-end employees. As a result, these will be the groups of workers whose opinions the authorities of Vology would want to find out to see whether or not their working process improved or became more difficult after the “blue team” and “red team” functions of the Infosec group were resumed.
That way, to measure the established security systems, the company’s authorities would need to launch a cyclic process that consists of such stages as gathering the data how the systems are implemented by the workers, monitoring their performance for some time, checking if there are any problems, and finally, concluding which aspects could be improved (Pelaez, 2010).
Organizational Continuity Planning and Incident Management
Business continuity planning is responsible for the safety of the business and its operations and has to cover a great variety of threats such as power outages, intentional sabotage or hacker attacks, accidents, and even natural and environmental disasters (A Guide to Business Continuity Planning, 2015). In other words, its objective is to predict the unpredictable. The responsible continuity planning ensures the reliability of a business for its clients and stakeholders. Being a private process, can continuity planning be transparent enough to be used as a means to attract and retain customers?
Reference List
A Guide to Business Continuity Planning. (2015). Web.
Benefits of Information Security Monitoring. (2012). Web.
Pelaez, M. H. (2010). Measuring effectiveness in Information Security Controls. Web.
Pironti, J. P. (2006). Information Security Governance: Motivations, Benefits and Outcomes. Web.