IT Security Management
Challenge
IT security organizations must manage risk, meet regulatory compliance requirements and fulfill user needs, all the while working to constantly reduce costs. But IT security management can do much more than "keep the bad guys out"; IT security management can "securely let the good guys in," thereby helping to enable critical business initiatives.
Opportunity
Effective IT security management is based on a comprehensive and integrated strategy that includes three major components: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Security Information Management (SIM) and Integrated Threat Management (ITM). Properly managing all three of these core requirements, in an interconnected way, can help you to more easily and effectively grow your business and strengthen relationships with customers and partners.
Benefits
Comprehensive and integrated IT security management can:
- Help speed the development and deployment of new applications
- Provide a consistent and positive online experience for users inside and outside the enterprise, improving overall satisfaction and loyalty
- Strengthen customer confidence that confidential information will be properly protected
- Expand and more tightly integrate your partner ecosystem and supply chain so you can greatly extend the services available to your online users and partners
- Create a more agile enterprise that can respond more rapidly to threats and opportunities
Issues Surrounding IT Security Management
In today's business environment, with the amount and type of sensitive data managed by organizations, security stands out as one of the most pressing IT concerns. IT security management groups must effectively manage their costs while reducing IT risk, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and fulfilling the needs of all IT users-employees, customers and partners. They must accomplish this in the face of old, new and emerging threats, attempts at unauthorized access (intentional or otherwise), as well as a constantly changing and usually growing user population.
Many organizations are currently managing IT security in application "silos"-highly targeted security implementations that are not consistent or integrated across the enterprise. This approach often involves the use of "point security" for specific problems, but does not provide a holistic approach for centralized security management. It may provide short- term benefits to a particular department or business unit, but this is often at the expense of future IT efficiency and effectiveness at the enterprise level.
A holistic and integrated approach to IT security management enables organizations to understand their security environment in all its complexity. Raw security data can be turned into actionable information, and critical IT assets and services can be protected against improper access across the entire environment.
In this type of environment, IT security management can make a measurable contribution to the business initiatives of the enterprise. But this is still an opportunity that is often underemphasized during IT security management, planning and resource allocation. This paper provides a point of view on how effective IT security management can help enable growth for your enterprise.
Requirements for Effective IT Security Management:
As an organization expands its assets and increases its exposure to a variety of users- including employees, partners and customers-a patchwork approach to security management controls is no longer adequate. Instead, organizations require a comprehensive solution that allows proactive management of their security environment.
An effective IT security management solution consists of three primary functional areas: - identity and access management (iam) Create and manage user identities, their accounts and access entitlements, and enforce access policies across the environment. - security information management (sim) Aggregate, filter and provide reports and analysis of all security-related events within the environment. An effective SIM solution also provides full auditing for provable compliance.
- Integrated Threat Management (itm) Identify and combat electronic threats such as viruses, spyware, spam, etc.
A complete security management solution must provide capabilities in each of these three critical areas, as illustrated in Figure A. As you can see, all of these areas of security management contribute to the creation of a strong security and compliance environment. However, many of these components, especially IAM, provide capabilities to help strengthen current business relationships and create new ones, thereby expanding growth opportunities. The next section explores the major benefits provided by integrated security management, followed by a broader discussion on enablement of business growth.
