Boulder rolling in Dark Reading

Boulder rolling in Dark Reading

My BSides Cleveland talk got some attention, and was part of a Dark Reading article on risk management. Check out 4 Reasons Why IT Security Needs Risk Management, also available as a PDF on my Press page.

“Traditional IT security has what I think of as a Sisyphus complex,” says J. Wolfgang Goerlich, information systems and security manager for a Midwest financial services firm. “Every day, we roll the boulders up hill. We leave with as many systems, or boulders, secure as possible at the top of the hill. Overnight, new attacks are formed and new vulnerabilities are released. The next morning, some systems are insecure again, and we start again rolling boulders back up hill.”

According to Goerlich and many of his peers, if security organizations are to evolve past that daily toil and affect meaningful change on their respective businesses, they need to embed risk management principles in their decision-making framework. “Moreover, rolling the boulder isn’t the goal of security, but rather the goal is securing the ability of the organization to accomplish its mission,” he says. “Risk management is an important technique that focuses security efforts on the organization’s mission and prioritizes efforts on critical systems.”

But what is important to the organization? What value does any given piece of technology deliver to the organization’s mission? To answer these questions, we have to step back first.

The first step in building an effective security program is aligning with executive management and tying security tasks back to business objectives. Once that is done, we can move on to building a ITGRC function (IT governance, risk, and compliance). But executive sponsorship is key, otherwise, it will be extremely difficult to get feedback and support from the business units. The importance of this support cannot be overstated. Pierluigi Stella, CTO, Network Box USA, says: “Proper risk management is done when IT is only the project manager but every single business unit contributes its own knowledge to the process; and this needs to start from the top, from the C levels.”

It is all part of building a mature information security program. For my full thoughts on building such a program, you can watch my BSides Cleveland Naked Boulder Rolling talk.

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