IT security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, destruction, corruption, modification, inspection, recording, or devaluation of digital information (data).
Business Continuity Management (BCM) involves arrangements designed to protect an organization's critical business functions from interruption due to incidents or, at the very least, to minimize their impact. BCM is essential for aligning technology and business with current threats to ensure the continuation of operations. It encompasses:
-
Analysis of requirements: Identifying critical business functions, dependencies, potential failure points, potential threats, and incidents or risks of concern to the organization.
-
Specification: Defining maximum tolerable outage periods and recovery point objectives (i.e., maximum acceptable periods of data loss).
-
Architecture and design: Developing an appropriate combination of approaches, including resilience, incident and emergency management, recovery, and contingency management.
-
Implementation: Configuring and scheduling backups, data transfers, duplicating and strengthening critical elements, and contracting with service and equipment suppliers.
-
Testing: Conducting business continuity exercises of various types, costs, and assurance levels.
-
Management: Defining strategies, setting objectives and goals, planning and directing work, allocating resources (e.g., funds, personnel), prioritizing relative to other activities, building teams, providing leadership, controlling, motivating, coordinating with other business functions, monitoring the situation, and updating arrangements when necessary. Continuous improvement, learning, and investment are crucial to maturing the approach.
-
Assurance: Testing against specified requirements, measuring and analyzing key parameters, reporting findings, and conducting additional reviews and audits to ensure that arrangements will work as planned if invoked.
The field of information security has grown and evolved significantly in recent years. It offers numerous areas for specialization, including securing networks and allied infrastructure, securing applications and databases, security testing, information systems auditing, business continuity planning, electronic record discovery, and digital forensics.
Major cybersecurity threats:
-
Ransomware: Locking the victim's computer system files—typically through encryption—and demanding a payment.
-
Malware: Includes worms, viruses, trojans, and spyware.
-
Social Engineering: Attacks that rely on human interaction to trick users into breaking security protocols.
-
Phishing: Fraudulent emails resembling legitimate ones are sent to deceive recipients.
Trends in cybersecurity:
-
Continued geometric growth. The rapid growth of electronic data processing, electronic business conducted over the internet, and incidents of international terrorism drive the need for better methods of protecting computers and the information they store, process, and transmit.
-
Dynamic nature ("race of sword and shield"). Cybersecurity must remain dynamic and updated due to the constant emergence of new threats.
-
Cyberwarfare. Governments and corporations may target an enterprise's critical infrastructure for strategic advantages, resulting in real damage without direct evidence of a crime.
-
Cloud migration. Organizations are shifting workloads to the cloud as their on-premises systems become outdated and they seek to leverage the latest technologies and tools.
-
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The geometric growth in data volume necessitates real-time analysis. Leading companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are leveraging AI and ML to address these challenges.
