Let’s be honest, being a CISO is no walk in the park. For starters, there are threats everywhere, thanks to external (hackers) as well as internal threats. Sensitive data, including financial and customer data are all stored in data centers, workstations, mobile devices, and cloud infrastructure. Maintaining these systems is far from easy. Industry rules and government regulations are tough, and malicious hackers are always finding new ways to infiltrate internal networks, subvert into IoT, and harm the workplace via phishing scams, malware, or ransomware. In the meantime, you need to convince your customers, insurers, and regulators all is secure. CISO ultimate guide for top 30 security framework- 2019.
Risk Management Priorities
For the CISO, this translates into setting priorities based on the big picture. Such as maintaining your customer’s trust and keeping the organization’s name out of the headlines. In order to accomplish this, there are 7 essential areas where security executives should be spending their time, and resources in 2019.
1.Develop a culture of security
The company’s culture must go hand-in-hand with policies and best practices. Every person within the organization must bear some responsibility for security. CISOs should emphasize the drive toward rapid development using cloud technologies.
2.Security and Risk Management
- Governance and resource requirements
- Security frameworks
- Data protection & training/awareness
- Insider threats, and third-party security practices as outsourcing increases.
3.Cloud Services
- Cloud strategy
- Proper selection of services and deployment models
- Scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities provided as a service utilizing internet technologies
4.Gain threat visibility across all platforms
One can’t secure what one cannot see. Implementing a Common Operational Picture (COP) within your enterprise so your organization has complete visibility of what data is coming throughout the network egress and ingress points. Having data spread across multiple tiers of applications /cloud services, and sometimes out on unauthorized services has greatly impacted the CISO’s ability to unify visibility.
5.Grasp the perimeter
Thanks to cloud computing, mobile devices, and IoT, the perimeter is an archaic concept. Both security and IT should change their assumptions about traffic, trusted users and the idea that there is a single demarcation point between public and private clouds. CISOs are now using new tactics to manage those perimeters. Some options are new identity and access management systems that consolidate identities across the enterprise and into the cloud, next-gen firewalls, and attack detection/analysis systems that can advert refined hybrid attacks.
6.Manage security in the cloud
It’s convenient for employees to store and share confidential business information on free file-sharing platforms such as Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. For example, an employee based out of Los Angeles starts to access the company’s cloud-based enterprise financial management from overseas and processes financial transactions five times higher than normal. CISOs are now investing in systems that detect these kinds of attacks and take steps such as forcing the use of two-factor authentication and a robust identity plus access management strategy.
7.Align SecOps with IT operations
SecOps often focuses on IT Ops to achieve their goals. SecOps establishes policies, identifies vulnerabilities and any misconfigurations, and then pushes IT Ops to apply patches, utilize baseline configurations and drive updates through the change and control process. CISOs should include DevOps into the conversation because when IT Ops must choose between applying patches, that SecOps needs, or delivering critical applications and infrastructure that DevOps needs. CISOs should expect them to prioritize DevOps’ needs. This is a matter of conflicting priorities, limited resources and supporting business growth.
