Security management is more than installing basic anti-malware and firewalls to devices that your employees use for work.
It’s about making your teams feel safe, whether they connect to the company’s network via home devices or while they are in the physical building of your organization.
Since management is such a broad area, it leaves many confused. What exactly is categorized in security management? What should companies do to protect their assets and create a safe space for their employees and clients?
Here, we answer some common questions about security management for organizations that want to keep their business protected.
What Has to Be Secured?
Assets of your organization that have to be protected include:
- Physical infrastructures and devices
- People who use your systems
- Personal data and other information that is circling the network
To determine which of your assets need continuous attention, consider which of them could be put at risk. What can be attacked and breached?
For instance, someone could break into your data center and steal information or damage equipment that your teams use to work every day.
Devices that the company requires for work such as laptops and mobile phones of your remote teams or hardware they might use to connect to your system on premises also need to be secured.
Another layer that must be considered is if you need a software escrow to protect information. Your employees, clients, and customers trust you with their data when they use their services. This asset has to be protected because data leaks can lead to them losing trust in your company.
In reality, all of your assets may not be so neatly organized and separated into data, physical location, and working hardware. For example, protecting people might include both guarding their sensitive data or even the physical infrastructure in which they work.
Therefore, it’s important to manage the security of your company on all the levels on which your organization operates.
Who Is Responsible for Security Management?
Everyone in the company is responsible for security. However, they have a varying degree of control.
The majority of your employees have the least responsibility, and they’re limited in what they can do to protect your company. For example, they should regularly change their passwords and attend general cybersecurity training workshops, but that’s about as deep as non-tech employees should be required to go.
IT teams and cybersecurity employees have greater obligations than others, because they have to properly use security tools and trace any changes in the system that might harm your business.
Security platform providers, different types of software, and systems that you use to run the company are liable for the cybersecurity of their products.
Ultimately, the organization itself has the highest level of responsibility to ensure that data of the employees, clients, and customers are kept safe within the systems that are protected against common cyberattacks.
What Are Some Common Security Management Strategies?
Every business needs a different strategy for operating its security because they have varied assets and systems. For some, it might be integral to protect physical data centers, others might have cloud technology that has to be protected from cyberattacks, etc.
Most companies need management in these three key areas:
- Data security
- Cybersecurity
- Network
Information security refers to using the policies that protect sensitive data intelligence within the system. Businesses should ensure the integrity but also the confidentiality of said data within the network.
Depending on your organization, you might need to follow the industry standards or have internal policies to secure information that is at your disposal.
Most of the management in companies nowadays refer to cybersecurity — especially for organizations that had to adapt to new technologies as they are common targets for hackers.
Cybersecurity is oriented towards protecting IT assets in the company. They have to be secured against known threats such as phishing, DDoS, and malware.
Also, they have to be updated and secured against the new methods and techniques that hackers have been using to breach organizations.
Network security must be frequently managed and monitored as well. Access is restricted either to a certain part of your system or in its entirety, with strict authentication and control.
Network management is also more than limiting levels of access. It includes managing all the tools that you have at your disposal to maintain the network and improve its performance.
Where to Start with Security Management?
To create the foundation of security management, pinpoint your assets. What do you have that needs to be protected? Take a note of all your employees, devices that you use for work, and physical infrastructures.
Discover what might make them vulnerable and which tools you need to protect your critical resources.
Then, develop a strategy and policies that would protect all of them — including policies, guards, or choosing security software that guards your network against likely attack vectors.
Here, management refers to continually discovering new flaws in the system and improving your cybersecurity posture.
This requires risk assessment, having the right tools, regular scanning, and mitigation of threats before they turn into incidents.
Conclusion
Security management is not one size fits all. Therefore, for every company it’s going to look different.
What most companies do have in common when it comes to security management is that they have to go through the process of understanding their assets. Additionally, choosing top software and protocols on how to protect them and ultimately applying them on a regular basis.
Depending on the type of organization, this process might need to be repeated continuously as well as automatically.
Security management is also not something that can be set up and left on the backburner. Systems and networks change every day.
New weaknesses could appear with any employee login or updates within the system and novel ways of hacking and are discovered every day.
It’s important to keep up with the latest developments in proper management as well as seek out flaws that need to be patched up before someone has the chance to exploit them.
