Quick Search
Business Benifits
Business Benefits: 
Despite the steady rise of security awareness among companies and organisations, the understanding of various benefits of information security audits remains rather limited. The main real world reasons for ordering information security assessments of any kind are still:
- regulatory, legal and compliance pressures
- assuring important security-conscious partners and clients that their information will not go astray or leak out to unauthorised persons
- assisting forensic investigations and preventing future incidents from happening after such an unfortunate event took place
All three reasons are completely valid, but there is far more to incorporating these important proactive services into your security schemes and operations. In particular, the practical business advantages provided by high quality professional information security audits can be divided into five main categories:
Timely discovery and elimination of security gaps and misconfigurations in services, systems and networks greatly help to avoid many potential unfortunate incidents or outright disasters. In particular, this applies to preventing confidential data exposures, valuable information damage or loss, online theft and fraud, and various denial of service attacks leading to severe availability problems. In a nutshell, proper independent information security audits preserve confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data and ensure uninterrupted operations of your systems. It can not be overemphasized, that after the IT infrastructure is fully deployed only such audits can be considered as informed prophylactic countermeasures intelligently preventing security breaches rather than responding to them when the damage is already done. Of course, to bring the desired benefits any information security audit must trigger appropriate and rapid follow-up response to it's outcome.
Apart from the obvious advantages of preventing monetary theft, valuable data loss, systems damage and services downtime, as well as avoiding potential incident recovery, response and investigation costs, security audits offer plenty of other noteworthy financial benefits. After all, any information security audit is a practical, hands-on risk and threat assessment and analysis. Detailed realistic knowledge and thorough understanding of various risks and threats your data and systems face provide highly valuable assistance when it comes to information security-related budget planning. You don't need to overspend on security solutions and procedures to stay on a safe side. Neither you would want to invest in any countermeasures that do not directly address the most likely information security risks your company or organisation is exposed to at the moment. Be highly selective, and consult your trusted security auditors when in doubt. Remember, that the correct assignment of priorities is just as important, as allocating justified sums of money and other resources to mitigate the uncovered risks. Minor low-risk issues can be sorted out later or even ignored, and usually do not require immediate resource allocation.
+ Management Benefits
Are all the rules of classifying and handling confidential and valuable data in your company or organisation strictly adhered to? And do these rules actually correspond to the current state of affairs? Are you sure that they don't need to be updated and modified to reflect it more precisely? How about rules and regulations covering the use (and abuse) of systems and networks? Do your employees follow them, or is there something fishy going on behind your back? Is confidential information leaking out and who could be held responsible for it? Are your technical stuff and contractors sufficiently qualified to counter the latest security threats? Are they aware of the existing risks? Can they stop a determined, experienced attacker? Should any of the professionals you employ attend specialised training courses or seminars dedicated to the most relevant information security areas to improve their skills and understanding? Or, perhaps, you might need additional specialists, software and appliances to stay safe. Are the already existing safeguards adequately configured and maintained? Is the whole information security infrastructure in your company properly built and it's support roles correctly assigned? High quality independent security audits can provide complete answers to these and other important IT, personnel and general management questions.
Public exposure of fatal security breaches can seriously damage both image and reputation of your company or organisation and completely shatter existing trust among current and potential customers and partners. Important business relationships can become broken within days, and your enterprise might end up as a target for highly annoying gossip and pun, both online and in the not-so-virtual world. On the other hand, regular thorough audits performed by well-known independent experts in the field will clearly demonstrate your seriousness in safeguarding all data, systems and networks under your control. No doubt, informing all interested parties about such proactive security measures will boost their confidence in safety of any transactions and business communications with you. In some cases, like signing long term partnership agreements or pursuing highly important deals, summarised and sanitised audit reports or specific report extracts can be provided to other participating parties to show high commitment to protecting data and upholding safety of your business operations.
No one can be hundred per cent insured against unfortunate information security incidents. However, subscribing for regular professional security audits and following their recommendations in full strongly confirms your intent to do everything to prevent such incidents from happening. Thus, in the case of any administrative or legal hearings, you can easily defend your conduct against all information security related due negligence accusations. Besides, there are multiple industry and government standards, regulations and legislations that either demand performing routine independent security audits in order to become and stay compliant or, at least, consider them as advantageous for the accreditation. Such standards include PCI DSS (needed for performing any online transactions using Visa and MasterCard), ISO27001 (often demanded from suppliers and business partners by multinationals and government organisations), FSA (Annex 2) and so on. Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II Accord put heavy emphasis on controlling and preserving audit trials; internal security audits will be helpful to strengthen and prove these controls.
This category is currently has no content associated with it.