A Guide to Establishing Information Security in Project Management

If you have the responsibility of taking care of the projects of cybersecurity in your company, chances are you will know how hard it can be to handle these cybersecurity programs effectively and efficiently. All while taking care of your day-to-day duties and long-term goals, you handle a number of one-time and ongoing cybersecurity activities.

For information security projects to be viable, security and IT experts need to execute a strong practice of project management. A proficient project management staff will help ensure that the projects are run smoothly, remain on spending plan, and are finished within the time period that was settled upon.

Role of InfoSec in Project Management

Streamlined Project Execution

As indicated in a survey for the project management by a firm McKinsey and Co., "officials found that adhering to project management techniques and procedures decreased risk, improved achievement rates, and cut expenses". There are so many commercial advantages of a project management office (PMO), and equal praise goes directly to the importance of project management for information security projects.

A practice of project management can help your InfoSec project to be on a budget and on schedule. A project manager of information security will implement and ensure that the task has clearly stated deliverables, that it is executed as per the plan that was initially made to meet the results, and that related changes, findings, and significant methods are imparted to every single pertinent partner in a convenient way.

Optimized Resource Allocation

The information security lack has hit a high record in present times, and is anticipated to increase in the next years, as indicated by ISACA's examination "State of Cybersecurity 2018". If you're one of the few blessed businesses with qualified Information security resources out there, you'll be aware, to say the least, that their time is very limited.

An information security project management makes this easier to manage resource distribution, ensure essential resources are operating on sensitive tasks, and ensuring the right resources are allocated to tasks.

By making the best use of resources, security management can take care of that the security projects are performed in light of ideal execution, and the capacities of the resource is regarded. In conclusion, your official group will be glad to realize that you're dealing with your InfoSec project in an effective way that won't be lost resources.

Strategic Alignment

For the success of an information security project, it should be ensured to manage the complete business goals and strategy.

If there is not a strong reason for business why this project should be implemented in your organization, chances are you won't be able to establish its significance and effectiveness down the road. Actually, the security project ought to be lined up with the relevance and amount of information you process, risk appetite, the threat exposure level, and the appropriateness of the regulatory requirements.

Better project security management made to keep the technology programs in line and ensure that they are conducted with ultimate business priorities in mind and can generate meaningful returns on investment (ROI). Sometimes, this is a high-level overview that security and IT professionals tend to supervise in their daily, hectic jobs.

Continuous Improvement

Strong practices of the project management for your security programs can enable your company to learn from mistakes, escape from these mix-ups and mistakes in the future, and in this manner encouraging the persistent improvement of procedures, strategies, and projects.

Often neglected in IT and security specialists' busy lives, adequate project management would not only act as a business insight but will save time and money for additional projects in the future.

Proble Resolution and Risk Management

Project management ensures proper management, mitigation, and communication of your InfoSec project risks.

At the beginning of a security project, a project administrator will distinguish and list the potential dangers of the task, convey them to the primary partners, and give an assessment to whether the task ought to be executed or not – despite its threats. When the project has begun, a project administrator will remember these risks, pay special mind to any other risk, and keep informed all the stakeholders included in the project.

If issues emerge, a project manager can perform the job of a middle person between resources and internal teams, but additionally between the external and internal spheres. Having a target case engaged with your security project will make sure that potential issues (for example confusion about deliverables, delays, and spending deviations) are revealed, tended to, and settled in an expert way.

How to implement security in Project Management

To better secure information about every project, we need to concentrate on protecting the information that is necessary for running a particular project (project information itself, company details, resources, personal data, etc.). Moreover, it is critical to recognize the classification of the data since its worth isn't generally the equivalent. For instance, names and surnames are cured as public, while data on worker compensations is viewed as private.

Even while certain information is considered available, we need to protect it regardless of that. The obvious reason is that without our permission, this could be modified. Therefore, one significant issue to focus on would be to identify information within your project, i.e. to define information classification and consider that not all information treated in the same way. Let us now take a deeper look at how ISO 27001 encourages to establish the security of information in project management.

Risk management is the most significant part of ISO 27001, which is a critical point if you need to oversee tasks as indicated by this standard of information security.

• Clearly characterize responsibilities and roles identified with information security (developers, information security auditors, CISO, systems administrators, etc.).
• Conduct risk management and treatment of the risks. For example, risks in software creation related to source code, or risks related to a company's entire IT infrastructure, etc.
• Explain the objectives of information security. Decrease the number of accidents to make public access to information more secure, etc.
• Create explicit approaches for the data security of a task. If the project is identified with programming advancement, it may be good to build up an arrangement identified with composing software code in a protected manner.