What is Cybersecurity Governance?

What is Cybersecurity Governance?

As a cybersecurity company in Miami, we know the importance of cybersecurity governance more than most of our clients. It's important to have a framework for managing security, but many businesses are just realizing that governance is a good thing.

What is Cybersecurity Governance?

Governance is a set of processes used to oversee something. Based on this definition, cybersecurity governance would be the process that security teams will follow to lower your business’s risks.

For example, governance would define how to:

  • Prevent risks
  • Detect threats or infiltration
  • Respond to threats

Businesses implement governance so that they have a framework to follow to reduce the risk of security breaches. Most processes will have:

  • Responsible employees named to respond to threats
  • Frameworks on how to respond to potential and existing threats
  • Room for improvement in the future 

Your framework should provide a strategic means for how to respond to threats and infiltration rapidly. However, the governance should consider the business’s risk management and cybersecurity goals, too.

Why Businesses Need Cybersecurity Governance

The cost and risk of cybersecurity continue to rise. Businesses worldwide recognize the ongoing threat of not taking cyber security seriously. However, there are many organizations that are not focusing on governance just yet.

Why?

They don’t understand the true benefit that governance offers to their business. A few of the many reasons that cybersecurity governance should be in place include:

  • Prevention: It’s always better to prevent an attack from being successful than it is to worry about cleaning up an attack. Governance will outline processes for evaluating security software, adding new devices and systems to the server, bring-your-own-device protocols and much more.
  • Detection: Processes must be in place to detect if your business has been the victim of a hack. You may mention teams that are responsible for monitoring systems and detecting attacks, ongoing threats and infiltration.
  • Response: Finally, processes will also be in place which outline what response is necessary to recover from an attack. This may mean restoring data from backups and patching the server at the same time, and determining who is responsible for recovery and more.

Even investors recognize the growing threat that cyberattacks pose to the businesses that they invest in. Many investors will not invest in businesses that do not have cyber governance protocols in place.

Good governance protocols should account for the following:

  • Regular security and system testing
  • Update protocols for all infrastructure and equipment
  • Rapid response to cybersecurity incidents
  • Implementation of risk and control measures
  • Data collection and assessment

Additionally, protocols should include a focus on awareness. Part of awareness is ensuring that there is proper employee training within the organization. New employees will need training, but advanced protocols will also include measures for continual training to protect against new threats that emerge.

Governance is only as good as the business’s ability to adopt it. It’s crucial that security teams get all top-level stakeholders on board to ensure implementation of your plan and processes is adopted.

Our team of security professionals offers cybersecurity in Miami. We can help you create a strategic approach to cyber threats that migrates risks and allows you to respond rapidly if a hack is a success.


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