Improving IT Security through a Sound IT Strategy

It is almost impossible to stay plugged in and go a day without catching a headline about another hacking or data breach, making its way into the news. In fact, by the midpoint of 2018, the IT Governance Blog reported that there had already been more than 600 data breaches that year. It is estimated that a hacker attack happens every thirty-nine seconds and the trend is for these hacker attacks to increase in both frequency and severity in the future. Suffice it to say, hacking is on the rise and affecting more and more institutions, from government agencies to private and publicly held companies to universities. What’s more important is world governments are beginning to hold companies and other institutions accountable for their cybersecurity and data breaches. In other words, the stakes are already high and getting higher.

Navigating Work in a Security-Focused World

While it may be tempting to “silo” the job of cybersecurity, it is nearly impossible to separate its importance from the ongoing mission of quality ITSM. There are many things that can be done, and improving IT security should be a cornerstone of any decent contemporary IT strategy. The integration of Identity Access Management (IAM) and Single Sign-On (SSO) technologies to drive user data and identity management is one way to keep your service management data secure through the use of secure technologies. The right service management tool can also incorporate risk detection while keeping devices updated with security/antivirus software and identifying illegal software and vulnerabilities, and automated to drive communication about potential risks and vulnerabilities both ways. With so much hanging on the technology you employ across your organization, you need to be able to detect risks coming at you from several angles (often simultaneously).

The Challenges of Designing Secure Software

Contemporary organizations that take their security seriously cannot afford to let IT security be an afterthought. In fact, careful consideration must be built into the designing or selecting of software architecture as a crucial step in product development and implementation. IT strategy that champions improving IT security requires that secure programming standards and methodologies be employed to reduce vulnerabilities in the resulting software. Way back in the stone age of five years ago, cybersecurity threats were primarily one of five types: trojans, unpatched software, phishing attacks, network traveling worms, or advanced persistent threats. Contemporary IT managers must protect their products and processes against a much wider variety of threats and combinations of attacks, including: advanced persistent threats, phishing attacks, trojans, botnet attacks, ransomware, DDoS attacks, wiper attacks, IP theft, data manipulation, spyware or malware, MITM attacks, rogue software, and the list goes on.

Creating a Secure IT Platform for Employees

Thankfully, as hacking has expanded and become much more commonplace, tools have been developed to help companies to continue strategically improving IT security. Educating employees and providing authentication tools has never been easier, thanks to automation and the employment of solid contemporary service management tools. Risk detection and communication, the identification of current and potential vulnerabilities, and other crucial aspects of IT security are more necessary now than ever before, but also easier to manage thanks in large part to the integration of IT strategy that puts security first across institutional contexts.
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