Cyber Security Governance, Risk, Compliance and Training

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Implementing standards for cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is made up of three components: people, process, and technology. Of the three, technology is often the focus of the majority, as it is possibly the easiest element to implement. However, for a business to successfully meet its security goals, all three elements must be viewed with a systematic, flexible, and scalable approach.

To achieve this, an effective Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) System is crucial, as it ensures that a holistic view has been taken, while tackling the daunting mission of cybersecurity. After all, automating a poorly thought-out process with state-of-the-art technology does not improve the process itself or the end results.

Creating A Cybersecurity Strategy

Creating a strong cybersecurity strategy is impossible without an effective Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) System. Therefore, it is imperative that companies establish it first if they want to meet their cybersecurity and compliance goals. By doing so, they can ensure they have the components to scale, adapt, and evolve as their business grows and regulations change.
When viewed in isolation, cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance can be considered as separate functions, however, when taking a holistic view of these critical components, the interdependency between them becomes obvious.

Governance

Cybersecurity governance entails establishing the basis for your cybersecurity policies and procedures. To build a foundation of governance, one should first identify the compliance requirements that apply to the subject organization. This involves researching and understanding contractual obligations, compliance frameworks, and identifying required or chosen standards that need to be implemented.

Once this is done, a gap analysis should be conducted to assess where the current system capabilities stand in comparison to the desired end state and charter a course to reach that target state. In other words, a strategy should be developed that should consider the acquisition, DevSecOps, management, security and allocation of human resources, including the definition and allocation of functions, roles and responsibilities.

Finally, policies, processes, and procedures should be updated and published to educate employees and ensure cybersecurity and governance are respected. Policies must be clearly aligned to business objectives while processes should specify how to upgrade legacy technologies to adopt modern organization and management techniques.

Risk

The second stage in scaling your GRC policy is to analyze your risk management. Performing risk assessments for every aspect of your organization and every business line and asset type is paramount. Once this is done and you have a full understanding of the risks within your business, you can implement a plan to mitigate, avoid, transfer, or accept risk at each level, line of business, and asset.
Risk management frameworks can be used to track systems by selecting controls and risks that can be continuously monitored and adjusted as the business grows and the threat landscape increases. The final stage is incorporating risk information into leadership decision making. Simply put, it should become routine to ask, “What is the financial, cyber, legal, and reputational risk to our business while making this decision?” By incorporating this approach into your culture, you can ensure you have complete visibility into your risk position when making critical business decisions and driving business growth.

Compliance

Linked directly to governance, compliance helps establish the security policies, standards and controls by which your organization will be monitored. Along with the reports generated by control oversight, you must proactively reassess your security capabilities and ensure they meet the needs of your business. This means automating application security testing and vulnerability scans, conducting self-assessments based on sampling of controls, as well as being overly critical of minute changes, red flags, and events that could pose significant risk.

Additionally, you must also be willing to adapt your processes in response to risk events and changes. As the sophistication of threats evolves, so should your security posture. Integrating your security operations with the compliance team for response management is key to this, as is establishing standard operating procedures to respond to unintentional changes.

Training

Having the best practices and policies in place is only effective if you properly train your employees on them and hold them accountable. More than half businesses cite human errors as the biggest information security risk. That is why training all employees, not only IT staff, on cybersecurity is becoming a core practice for organizations.

GRC has an interdependent relationship

When viewed in isolation, cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance can be considered as separate functions, however, when taking a holistic view of these critical components, the interdependency between them becomes obvious.

Governance ensures that the organization’s activities are aligned in a way that supports the organization’s business objectives. The risk associated with any organizational activity is identified and addressed in a way that supports an organization’s business objectives. Compliance allows all organizational activities to be operated in a manner that complies with the laws and regulations that affect those systems. And all three aspects work together to create an approach that will allow security architecture, engineering, and operations to align with broader business goals, while effectively managing risk and meeting compliance goals.

But how do you scale a GRC system and make sure it is integrated into your organization?

How to scale a GRC system?

One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to GRC and it doesn’t have to; The depth and breadth of the systems will vary from business to business. However, regardless of the complexity of a system, it can be transformed or scaled for the adoption of cloud services, emerging technologies, and future innovations, provided you follow best practices.

Why DCS?

Our team of cybersecurity experts have extensive experience in implementing GRC systems and conducting trainings not only in Saudi Arabia but in the GCC as a whole. Our affiliations with consultancy firms and training centers in the region allow us to provide our clients with the best approaches and latest trainings to defend against cybersecurity threats and immune them against cyber attacks quickly and effectively.