You wouldn’t want to fly on a plane that hasn’t had its regular safety inspection. Or take a road trip without checking your oil and tire inflation. Or miss an annual trip to the doctor — would you? Similarly, periodically assessing your IT security is an important part of your organisation’s preventive maintenance plan. Security is mostly an invisible attribute. We tend to set it up and then forget about it. But each of us has our blind spots, causing us to miss things. Our infrastructure changes over time, possibly opening it up to new vulnerabilities. And new methods of attack are invented daily, so what was secure yesterday may not be secure today. Just as every car comes with a list of scheduled maintenance items, no matter the size of your IT organisation, you should have a list of security features to audit on a periodic basis. You can do many of them yourself, but there’s no substitute for having an independent expert occasionally check for your blind spots. There are many benefits to doing periodic assessments beyond simply complying with government regulations. Undertaking regular assessments can help you to: • Demonstrate to your customers that security is important to you — this shows them that you care about them and their data. • Find out whether your internal security has already been compromised. You might not know unless you look. • Stay on top of the latest security threats — with new attacks coming on the scene every day, you could become vulnerable even if nothing has changed since your last assessment! • Make sure that your staff is being vigilant by maintaining a focus on IT security. • Increase awareness and understanding of security issues throughout your company. • Make smart security investments by prioritising and focusing on the high-importance, high-payoff items. If you cannot put resource toward this critical task, you must consider an independent auditor.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:00:54 +0000
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