NewslettersRelated Resources
EventSource October 2008 – How to recession proof IT; Get hard dollar savings today Featured Article Performing well during a security By Jasmine Noel “Every crisis offers you extra desired power” William Moulton Marston Crises will happen no matter how many precautions we take. The need to blame someone is a human desire and it is easy to focus that on the crisis response team, because they are visible. Yet when teams perform well during the crisis they don’t merely avoid blame. They do garner the potential to become powerful advisors or outright leaders. It’s even better if you can also demonstrate that lessons learned from past crises are making the current environment more secure. After all, the Justice League members wouldn’t be heroes if no one knew about their actions. But what does it mean to perform well in a crisis? Not so long ago performing well during an IT security crisis was about how rapidly the security administrator could shore up firewall breaches or deliver anti-virus patches. But times have changed, now performing well in a security crisis is a team effort – security, network, system, application and desktop folks are involved. Team performance, however, is not simply a sum of the individual talent of team members – just ask the 2004 US Olympic basketball team, or the current Cincinnati Bengals for that matter. Joking aside, I’m sure that if you look at every large scale disaster you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of competent people working extremely hard to deal with the situation. Yet their individual efforts are often overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation and the lack of coordination (the broad brush of 20-20 hindsight doesn’t help either). IT security situations are no different. A diverse team of people must perform well during the crisis to protect not only corporate infrastructure and business intelligence, but the “digital lives” of their customers as well. Which begs the question, how can IT increase its odds of performing well under these stressful situations? As far as I can tell, the basics involve: 1) Understanding what is happening 2) Having well known contingency configurations and plans Contingency planning is not only about to-do-lists. It is also about decision-making and responsibilities. There are lots of people who can make good decisions under pressure. But a worse disaster will ensue if every one of them went off and did their own thing, in their own way, without telling anyone. This will happen every time if the crisis management team is poorly defined and no one has established:
If critical information doesn’t reach the right people, in the right way, at the right time, then you are in for many, many sleepless nights of preventable remediation work. It pays to clearly define the team, their responsibilities and information needs first – and then set up the emergency information consoles, reports, etc. that each team member needs. 3) Practicing Secondly, practice helps everyone understand that the crisis response plan is not a blame game in disguise. Instead, it is an opportunity to get people to trust the plan and the people involved. This is particularly important in large enterprises because there are more people involved, and those people are often not in the habit of collaborating. It is hard to work with someone new in stressful conditions because no one knows what they’ll do. Practice overcomes that. 4) Auditing everything and then some 5) Dealing with the aftermath The other part of the aftermath is dealing with the hordes of misinformation that will be disseminated about the situation. Blogs, posted comments, and poorly worded customer notifications can add up to chaos. And good luck if you find yourself setting up a customer call center without a pre-negotiated contract; or you set up a ‘crisis info’ website that promptly crashes from zillions of hits; or you are dragged to a press conference without being able to explain everything from why it happened to the extent of the damage in non-technical terms. But really, things don’t have to go this way. That’s what crisis planning, solutions and practice is for. Real IT executives have lived through these things and still have their jobs. Hopefully we can all be as effective. Jasmine Noel is founder and partner of Ptak, Noel & Associates. With more than 10 years experience in helping clients understand how adoption of new technologies affects IT management, she tries to bring pragmatism (and hopefully some humor) to the business-IT alignment discussion. Send any comments, questions or rants to jnoel@ptaknoelassociates.com Industry News In the current economic environment, IT is well positioned to make a compelling case for strategic spending that can help weather the storm. Looking for hard dollar savings today? Consider SIEM technology. It not only reduces the risk of costly breaches and non-compliance, but provides tangible cost savings Credit-card security standard issued after much debate The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, the organization that sets technical requirements for processing credit and debit-cards, has issued revised security rules. The council also indicated that next year it will focus on new guidelines for end-to-end encryption, payment machines and virtualization. Did you know? EventTracker enables compliance with PCI section 10 and 11 with its integrated Log Management and Change Monitoring solution Data breaches reach record high Did you know? EventTracker helps safeguard critical data, whether at rest, in use or in motion Corrective Action Plan and $100,000 Fine Illustrate Tougher HHS Stance on HIPAA Enforcement For the first time, a covered entity (CE) under the privacy and security rules has made a $100,000 payment to Uncle Sam and agreed to subject itself to three years of monitoring by HHS for losing unencrypted laptop computers and backup data more than two years ago. Cool Tools and Tips Understanding Change Management Understand how Change Management can help you: Featured Webinar From the trenches: Learn how a premier multi-site academic community hospital substantially increased their security profile by implementing a complete SIEM solution. They were able to minimize security risks and the risk of non-compliance by:
View webinar here Legal
|
© 2010 Prism Microsystems, Inc. • Privacy • Terms of Use