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Information Security - What is it about?
As more and more businesses are depending on information technology, new challenges and concerns have grown up for managing and maintaining the security of the information. Problems are more where the applications are dealing with customers or corporate sensitive data. No industry vertical is spared from this. Statistics show that more businesses are going on a global scale; outsourcing is on its peak to take advantage of efficient and expert processes to manage the business. To accommodate the changes in business dynamics, to cope up with the distributed work environments more applications are being ported from client server to WAN/ internet based. Today's day almost 30,000 sites on the internet are hit world wide by one or other unauthorized activity.
On the other hand, with equal pace, businesses are automating their processes for faster and accurate results, to improve efficiency and to cope up with the geographical boundaries. Citing the information security problems there are several application tools those have been developed. The IT market flooded with tools right from virus protection to server monitoring, from port scanning to intrusion detection. Also there are several standards and regulations like HIPAA, ISO27001 etc. mandating or providing the best practices to utilize for mitigating the risk of information loss.
Are software tools helpful?
The majority of the tools available today are corrective measures rather than preventive. If a virus attack happens, then it will be detected. What we really want is the procedure so that viruses won't get into the business networks in the first place. Once Einstein said "Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them". We have all intellectual tools and are waiting for some genius to come.
With the diversity of the technology, the architectures, individual development and deployment platforms, the unique way of each business to handle the information at each department like HR, outside vendors makes it virtually impossible to develop some application or software tool that will run by itself and prevent any attacks on the information. Especially if there a manual data processing at any level, it poses a great threat of a leakage.
IT Compliance Process vs. IT Compliance Tools
To make a real strong preventive plan, one will need to strongly depend on the processes than the software tools and even develop the processes for the development of the software tools. Many intellects have done 90% of the job by defining what is good and providing the guidelines on how to achieve it. Most of the certifications and regulations such as ISO27001, SAS70 and HIPAA detail the guidelines and best practices to be implemented.
Companies or individuals who have gone through the audit procedures or certifications processes complain about the effort that it is too extensive (read as expensive). More trouble is for the companies who are mandated by multiple regulations and need to maintain multiple certifications. Experiences are getting certified is 10% job done while maintaining it and providing governance is the most difficult task. Need of the time is to have tools providing the way for managing the processes and overall IT governance. In short we need IT to govern IT.
Benchmark's Information Risk Mangement Solution
Benchmark is one of the few of the vendors those have tried to make the IT governance a reality. Many of the existing tools come with the huge implementation costs and are mostly suitable for the larger corporations. Benchmark has designed simple tool which will make the process of managing the compliances simple and easy task. Our product "Litmus" is web enabled solution, provides the default set of controls to implement, unique dashboard to check the state of health of the organization with provision for audits and management of multiple compliances. It can be virtually customized to any of the best practices across the organization.
To learn more on how Benchmark IT Solutions can assist you in with your Information Security needs, please contact us at 407-878-3960
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