Suppose you are a digital correspondence and want to make sure that your assets, which is the data and other relative information, stays secure at all times. In that case, you have to implement a security centric culture within your organization. Nobody is willing to talk about it, but security is the most crucial aspect of an organization, and it must be guarded at all times. Taking this concept to the internet, you will come around various security-centric failures and blunders that made a company plummet all the way to the ground. It might have occurred due to a tiny mistake that an employee made or the organization not having enough security systems embedded to guard their interests.
Either way, the picture that is painted around cybersecurity and breaches that happen and the loss these incur is horrific. If you want your organization to do better regarding the implementation of various security metrics and be secure at all times, you would have to implement smart security protocols. It is a little hard to pull off, but it can be done while following the below-motioned guidelines. But before that, you must understand the importance of implementing a smart security culture within your organization.
Building a Smart Security Culture
Talking about the implementation of various security implementations, you need to be exact and thorough with it. You must know about your shortcomings security-wise and the implementations that can take care of these. But most importantly, you must look forward to nurturing a security-based culture for your organization; it must not be emphasized or forced upon and should be allowed to grow organically.
Smart security is about taking care of the current challenges and building a suitable approach for deactivating future threats as soon as these surface. Everyone must follow and comply with this security detail, or otherwise, it would not work the way it should. Computers and other associated systems would continue to do what they are asked to or programmed with, so smart security is not for computers or associated devices.
It is for people and your employees to understand the mere importance of it, challenges that can be tackled with such an approach in effect, and most importantly, the development of a framework that can strengthen its approach.
- Security Belongs to Everyone
This is an approach that you need to instill when moving forward with your organization's smart security implementation. It is not only meant to be followed by the employees; the upper bodies such as managers and leaders should also embrace and practice it like the rest of the crew.
Many organizations do have an assumption that only the security department, in fact, is responsible for upholding security-related elements, but it is wrong and immature. Security is everyone's responsibility, and no single entity or department can be held liable in the event of a security breach or violation.
This concept needs to be nurtured, accepted, and promptly followed for it to nest its roots and work deliberately. As soon as you can get your staff, employees, and the leadership to comply with these settings, the sooner things would start falling into shape for you.
- Identify Your Risks
The next thing that you need to do for the sake of implementing a smart security system is to identify your risks, know about your shortcomings, and most importantly, how these can affect you in the long run. Think about the information that you want to be well protected and its use restricted to the majority and only available for a selective few to interact. Do you have such kind of information on board? Does everyone have access to this information or not? Is there any specific authentication system in place to decide access?
These are the types of questions that you should be asking yourself in terms of identifying the risks. Monitoring and reporting tools can be of huge help here. There are various firewall and internet security products that can help you monitor the network at all times and raise red flags whenever an unauthorized request has been received.
This is called risk assessment; this way, you can become sure of the security risks that your organization faces and devise smart security practices in relation to the risk. But make sure that your employees are on board and duly understand the collection of information for the sake of risk assessment.
- Comply with Legal Requirements
Every specific sector of a business have legal requirements and obligations, for the business to operate and run these obligations smoothly should be fulfilled and the requirements promptly followed. When you are working on your smart security implementations, make sure that they are in correspondence with your business's legal requirements. For example, suppose your organization store the personal information of the users. In that case, you might be required to conform to these legal requirements to ensure the data's privacy and integrity.
Any liability or a chance of off-putting these requirements must be discarded at all costs; having a detailed security policy documented and made accessible to all company members should take care of these requirements. On the other hand, it will also make sure that any and all liabilities are not pointing towards the organization itself but would affect the person or department who is caught in violation of the security policy in effect.
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- Too Much Security Is Bad
On the other hand, if you decide to become too enthusiast with your smart security implementations and want to take things to a new possible level, know that too much security is as bad as no security. If you are hindering the access of your staff/employees to data that they need in order to work or fulfill their duties, then you are becoming an obstacle in their path and thus affecting business operations. There is no need to be overprotective; what you need to do is define your security limits and rules; having a written code of conduct is the best possible solution to this problem. When you have it around, and everyone knows about it, there shouldn't be any problem, your staff is mature enough, and you should respect this while working with them.
A simple trick here that should get you up to speed would be to cover your legal requirements, and that is all; if your security implementations cover all compliance and other legal elements, then it is good to go, and there is nothing more that needs to be done in this regard.
- Training of the Employees
The beacon of smart security implementation can't shine forever if your employees are not 100% on board with the changes that have been made to the security policy. So, being the manager or leadership of the company, it is your responsibility to engage them in some rigorous training to understand each and every component of the new security policy they have to follow. Individual training can also be done or formulated for your employees based on their department's department or specific needs.
Providing them with a real-world simulation and training would help them instill a sense of action plan they need to follow when subjected to a security-related scenario in real life.
This can be extremely rewarding as many end-users would ask questions related to the security policy and the protection of the data. If your employees would have undergone this training, they will be able to properly understand the dynamics of the question and answer them right away. Other than that, it would also ensure the efficiency and optimal performance of the business issues because everyone is acclimated with the security policy, they know how they can handle data and moreover what would be the consequences if they try to operate out of these bounds.
- Secure Development Lifecycle
Most of the time, during the development of new applications or software systems, some glitches or bugs remain that come haunting the company in the aftermath. If you don't want this to be the case with your company, then it is recommended that you get your hands on a secure development lifecycle right now. An SDL is the processes and activities that your organization is willing to perform for each software or a new system release.
An SDL will greatly help you and your business operations in the long run, such as taking care of the security requirements, threat modeling, and even conducting security testing as well.
If you already don't have an SDL for your organization, then it means almost every niche of your organization, from product development to product deployment, is working without an overlook. Many end-users are also requesting dedicated organizations to have and implement a solid SDL for their industries if they don’t already have one to streamline the process of threat detection and its mitigation in a timely manner.
Not only will you be able to customize your product development deployment life cycles, but you would be able to do that at no expense of introducing a new security threat or bug within the update only to surface among the current devices of the end-users. That is why it is a sound investment and a dedicated one that you should be doing right now.
- Setting Penalties and Enforcing Them
Security policy is no joke and you as the leader or manager of your organization must see to it that it is enforced properly with all the requirements and rules being followed by every member of the organization. But on the other hand, if that is not the case and there are some irregularities being caused by either one or a whole department, then you must define some penalties that should be upheld and stomped over the head of those who do wrong by the security policies or are caught in violation of these.
Suppose you are not willing to be this thorough and complete in understanding and working on the penalties. In that case, no one will ever take the security policies that you have designed seriously, and your whole organization would still remain unprotected despite your tries to change the status otherwise. As you have your security policy in writing, get the penalties rules and procedures in writing to ensure that everyone has read them and know the consequences for a specific breach of the security policy.
The penalties, fines or other punishments must be made clear in writing so that every employee knows about the consequences in advance and would be tried according to the set procedure. Know that a security policy that is not enforced with penalties and other dedicated elements is as bad as having no security policy or implementation in place at all.
- Update Your Staff
People come and go, and it is the ultimate truth of the business sector. Your security policy and implementations must be documented and also present in writing as well. That is why you need to make sure that the current staff that you have complies with the requirements and legalization of the security policy. If some employee or a department can't progress with the current security policy in place, they need to go.
In the same way as security policy continues to change, the staff as well need to change on such a dynamic basis. But if you believe that with a little persuasion and training, the current staff is capable of executing their duties, then this is the road that you should take; otherwise, what is the use of implementing a new security policy if no one is going to follow or comply with it.
Updating your staff from time to time in relation to the changes made to security policy or filling them up with these changes should be considered an important aspect of this whole crusade.
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