Six Steps to a Better Security Strategy

Six Steps to a Better Security Strategy

As we all know that for a productive and profitable business, strategy or planning is must. In fact, planning is done for each and every aspect of business so that we can work well in all the directions. In these instructions, one and most important is Security, as no business can compromise with it. So, it is expected and suggested that there must be a good security strategy to protect our business from any kind of threat.
So, in this article read six major steps to a better and good security strategy for any business.

Step No. 1: Become a Credible Stakeholder

A Security leader must be an expert, a good decision maker, a consultant and overall a capable executive. So, first of all you need to become a credible stakeholder. For this,

• User must know each and everything about his organization. Mission, Objective, Vision, deals in which kind of products or services, financial position, employees, suppliers, vendors, customers, their likes, dislikes etc. Overall, understand your organization well.
• Know the key stakeholders of your company with their role, responsibilities, goals etc.

Step No. 2: Connect With Your Business

Using the information gain in Step-1, start working on the process of business alignment.

• Focus on current business strategies. User must be familiar with existing as well as current business strategies, whether they are related to sales, marketing, product, information technology or others.
• Know business projects which are previously planned and current ones. All of them have their own security requirements or implications. Identify them with possible common themes between these projects.
• Pick up the pet projects, as when security efforts are implied to these projects, they are expected to get good support.
• Align your security strategy with goals and metrics.

Step No. 3: Search the Gaps

In this step, try to find out the security risks which may cause threats to your business.

• Control gaps and vulnerabilities must be recorded. Here using results of vulnerability tests, findings of the current audit, penetration, and analysis on control gap shortfalls in current security environment must be identified. Give priority to important business processes and systems.
• Risk needs to identify and quantify. Identify the security risks harmful to business’ strategic initiatives and then quantify the same by different ways.
• Identify the potential controls. Now, identify the potential security controls for the risk identified above, which may mitigate the same and find if team implement those controls what will be the residual risk.

Step No. 4: Recognize/Find the Security Challenges

Now try to identify the security challenges, which may be the hurdles or potential risks for your business which might be mitigated by the security team. To identify them, you required to,

• Monitor each and every regulatory activity, as some of them have serious impact on the security environment. So, working with legal services/counterparts may avoid compliance surprises.
• Update yourself with the latest news of your business, customers, vendors, rivals, business partners, suppliers, and others in detail. Read the newspapers, business magazines, social media content, trade publications especially related to your business.
• Keep an eye on your co-workers and competitors. If any new product planning is done in market which may affect your business and you are aware of the same, plan or shift your strategy to respond well to the market, as there could very well be security implications.
• Contact to your technology mgt. Department of your organization to know about projects which are previously planned or in current, may affect your organization, to anticipate the same.

Step No. 5: Brainstorm New Opportunities

This step identifies the new opportunities which may accelerate business value. It offers a prospect by which new security initiative can be created, or new technology can be implemented, which offers support and also protect business interests. For instance,
New possibilities arise out of new technologies to add business value.

• New possibilities arise out of new technologies to add business value.
• Improving the process across the business.

Step No. 6: Bring All Together

• In the last step, draft a neat and clean, logical, comprehensive document with your priorities. Remember, your decisions must be evident.
  Form a big list. Now identified security tasks must be collated, remove the duplicates, and form a big list of business activities related to security.
• Next, group the tasks related to security by threat, business initiatives, technology, etc. to build various security initiatives.
• Now connect security initiatives to business interests, which comprises of objectives, proposals, projects etc. Business interests represent the surface area to which security initiatives can be linked. If these links are powerful, your business will be more compelling for each and every initiative. To connect most of the security projects to business interest, team must be creative and need brainstorming.
• Everyone must agree on the relative priorities of all the security initiatives in your strategy. This can be happen when we work with our business colleagues so that a common list can be achieved. Everyone must understand compliance requirements, business drivers, technology plans and interdependencies, and agree on the same.