The Goals of Cybersecurity Governance

In today’s companies, cybersecurity has become a top-priority buzzword. Many leaders feel a need to secure their data and networks and a conscientious leader wants to reduce his regulatory and security risks while driving ROI through cybersecurity investment.

But how does cybersecurity governance actually work? What are the best practices and systems to establish a robust cybersecurity defense for your company? What does a stellar cybersecurity risk management plan involve? What cybersecurity regulations exist that leaders need to know about?

Let’s explore.

What is cybersecurity governance?

The technical definition is “Cybersecurity governance is the branch or division of overall enterprise governance and oversight that deals with how the enterprise uses and depends on cyberspace in the context of digital ‘enemies’ such as hackers, phishers, and so on.”

A good cybersecurity governance policy includes clearly defined risk management strategies, technical controls, administrative policies, and more. This will include the right administrative goals and processes to mitigate risk and maintain compliance in the event of an attempted data breach, or the like.

Additionally, this will typically include some kind of performance metric, specifically delineating, reporting, and utilizing information security governance standards to evaluate a system’s defensive integrity.

What are the goals of cybersecurity governance?

Prevention – Risk Management

Cybersecurity protection and risk management means having the right “gates” and protective mechanisms in place if and when data is transferred, and for contexts in which data is stored.

When potentially sensitive personal, financial, or logistical data related to an organization and its customers is transferred, cybersecurity protection has the right layers and checkpoints to facilitate the transfer of this information so that it isn’t visible or interceptable by third parties. This can include things like data encryption, firewalls, and more.

For static sensitive data that is digitally stored, risk management means having both the physical security components of data center protection as well as the appropriate use of cryptographic modules so that even if a hard drive is physically stolen, the data cannot be accessed.

More practically, risk management starts with prevention, from password practices to data disclosure policies, and more.

It’s important to note that risk management is not simply the responsibility of an IT team, but is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. Everyone has a part to play in making wise decisions concerning sharing information, understanding phishing threats, changing passwords, and much more. Healthy cybersecurity governance will include ongoing education and annual awareness training to help keep everyone in the organization abreast of best practices and guidelines.

Detection

Cybersecurity governance means having the right tools, skills, and resources to detect threats, irregularities, and other indicators of potential breaches or attacks, and activating reactive protocols quickly based on detected issues.

Detection means knowing the state of your information security and rapidly being able to uncover and identify a breach as it occurs.

Responding

When data breaches happen, and they do happen to almost everyone with anything of value, exactly how will you respond? Responding to cybersecurity attacks and malicious activity is much like responding to a fire. You can find fire by looking for the smoke it creates and cyber attacks often leave clues (smoke) that can be easily detected.

First, you must analyze and properly understand the nature of the threat, what has caused it, what exactly is doing, where it is located, what it is trying to do, and so on. Next, as you’re anticipating its activities, you must isolate the threat by creating a sort of wall or protection and cutting off the threat’s ability to infiltrate and influence other areas of your data. Then, you must attack the threat directly and cut off whatever source the threat is using within your network to perform its functions. Next, once the threat has been contained and eradicated and there is no other present way for data to be breached, you must begin the process of recovery or restoring and rebuilding whatever data was corrupted or lost. You must also reestablish operations for the data that operates more stringently against the kind of threat you’ve experienced.

What’s the outcome of great cybersecurity governance?

The result of a healthy cybersecurity governance program is that your organization will have a comprehensive understanding of where your security risks are, where you are most vulnerable, and what everyone should be doing every day to secure and protect data and sensitive information. In an ideal situation, each and every employee will feel a sense of responsibility to make sure that they are playing their part in protecting data and exercising best practices with items like changing passwords, not clicking on suspicious links, and exercising discretion when communicating sensitive information internally or with customers and vendors.

It’s impossible to stop all data breaches and malicious activity, but a good cybersecurity governance plan will have enough checkpoints, firewalls, and data controls that attacks can be quickly contained and eliminated.

These are just a few of the marks of a successful cybersecurity governance plan.

Gray Analytics can help

Gray Analytics can help with your cybersecurity governance by providing the exact information and resources you need to keep your organization safe. Gray Analytics gives you peace of mind, so you can worry about what matters most: leading your company.

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