Building a Business-Driven Security™ Strategy

Today, a disconnect exists between management and IT departments that exacerbate the multi-billion dollar losses and cybersecurity expenses in which businesses incur every year. This misalignment stems from a traditional siloed approach to cybersecurity: Management orchestrates the daily operations of the company while the security team focuses on cyberthreats. This results in what RSA calls a “gap of grief,” which impairs an organization’s ability to mitigate and defend from threats. RSA outlines several key steps to bridge this gap by transforming a disconnected approach into a business-driven security™ strategy.

Understanding the Gap of Grief

Business-driven security™ has the goal of adding context to cybersecurity. When a data breach happens, business leaders are less interested in the technical aspects of the attack; they want to understand the exposure and damage in business terms. When an organization successfully bridges the gap of grief, the two formerly independent units work on the same page and with a mutual perspective.

Organizations must consider four goals when developing this strategy:

1. Full visibility: Organizations that empower their IT departments with 360-degree visibility ensure that the security team can fully monitor the enterprise’s cyber ecosystem.
2. Rapid Insight: The more time a company needs to assess the damage of a security breach, the greater its risk.
3. Response: Organizations must quickly turn rapid insight into action by automating responses to suspicious user activity.
4. Contextual intelligence: Security teams must understand the business context of the systems to assess accurately the impact of a security breach and respond accordingly.

Bridging the Gap of Grief

Security teams must fully understand what the normal operations of the business look like in order to truly comprehend anomalies, and management has to understand security risks so that they can avoid introducing practices that render an organization vulnerable to cyberattacks. Transform to a business-driven security™ strategy using these six steps:

1. Prioritize assets and processes and understand their vulnerabilities.
2. Quantify business risks. What does it mean to continue business operations when something has been compromised?
3. Build a holistic defense strategy by leveraging your people, processes and technology.
4. Figure out how far you are from your ideal security operations. You need to know your destination before you chart the course.
5. Plan in phases using the information you’ve gathered about priorities, risk, availability of assets and your current status.
6. Evolve when necessary. Make this an ongoing and evolving plan. Threats change daily, so you must be nimble and adapt through periodic re-evaluation.

Cyberthreats are devastating. Billions are spent globally to stave off security relentless attacks, but unless business and security come together and align their strategies, these threats will continue to exist and disrupt the operations of enterprises. Read more about business-driven security™ strategies in RSA’s in-depth white paper and infographic and learn how businesses can bridge the gap of grief.