Building a Secure EnvironmentBuilding a Secure Environment
Organization for Security
The Organization for Security is a group of leaders that promotes a secure and stable environment by developing and implementing policy. Its roots are in the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). Its members are governments and other organizations that are primarily European, but also includes representatives from the United States and Canada.
Creating an organizational security policy
An effective organization security policy outlines how the utility will meet its security goals, based on the information that the utility has collected. It should be updated regularly to reflect new threats, business objectives and regulations. It should also be reviewed by all stakeholders and rewritten if necessary.
Developing a community of security advocates
A well-developed and engaged security community is critical to protecting the assets and resources that your utility relies on. The community can be comprised of a variety of people, including security advocates, the security aware and sponsors from management.
Having a community that is dedicated to security can help to improve the organizational culture and make it more accountable for information security. It can also be an effective way to build trust and bolster support for security policies and programs.
Ensuring that all employees understand security and privacy best practices is an important building block of a sustainable security culture. Employees should be able to identify the ramifications of poor security practices and the penalties that they may face.
Setting up a security awareness training program is another key building block for cybersecurity. It teaches employees the importance of security, and it makes them accountable for their decisions once they gain the knowledge.
The training should be tailored to the employee’s job role, and it should be reinforced by regular communication from the leader. The training should be made accessible in a variety of ways, including webinars, e-mail, and face-to-face meetings.
Establishing a centralized security operations center
A managed security operations center (SOC) is an advanced tool that provides an organization with the ability to monitor suspicious activity and detect threats in real time. Managed SOCs can also provide technical assistance to mitigate risks and ensure that systems are protected against malicious attacks.
Managing security at all levels of an organization requires a high level of skill and expertise. A seasoned SOC team is able to detect security threats before they are exploited and mitigate the damage to an organization.
Hiring talent for cybersecurity roles is an essential step to a sustainable security culture. Once leaders have prioritized the roles they need to fill, they can begin building detailed job descriptions. They can then determine whether they should upskill existing team members or hire new talent.
Upskilling the talent you have already in-house is often a more cost-effective solution than hiring new ones. Using the job descriptions from step 1 as a guide, leaders can determine which of their current cybersecurity employees could fit best in those priority roles.
When leaders are able to lay out a road map of the top security priorities and pair talent against them, they will have clarity on how they can most effectively reduce risk. This approach is known as talent-to-value protection. It allows a CISO, CIO or vice president of security to focus on the most crucial aspects of risk and reduce them one at a time rather than trying to mitigate risk in all areas simultaneously.