Part 1 — Reconcile rapid digital transformation with security and compliance
By Jaber Kakar |11/23/21 12:11 PM |1 Minute Read
Digitalization is omnipresent and it affects various businesses, including, and especially financial institutions. With customers of all those institutions leading the way in their digitalization efforts, financial institutions are competing in the digital transformation arena. At the same time, financial enterprises are heavily exposed to a wide range of regulations. As digital technologies become more pervasive, information security risks increase. A major hurdle of digital transformation in the financial industry is therefore to reconcile rapid digital transformation with information security and regulatory compliance and to make it as efficient as possible.
What does the reconciliation process look like? In this blog series, we will discuss the main steps towards a fully digitized information security framework. Let’s start with part 1 or rather step 1 of this process.
Understand your assets that need protection
Information security cannot begin until you have a clear understanding of what is security-relevant or worth protecting. But how exactly do you develop this understanding? In short and simple terms:
Understand your business processes and the data processed or generated in these processes.
In particular, the relevance of the data to various legal aspects, including but not limited to the General Data Protection Regulation, is of importance. Our consultants provide broad and deep expertise in globally recognized standards, such as ISO27001, NIST, SOC 2 that will help you with this analysis. But why is this so-called structural analysis necessary?
The structural analysis creates transparency and provides you with the basis for increasing automation as part of your efforts in maintaining a high level in information security.
Complex relationships between assets, sometimes previously unknown to your organization, are thus identified and documented. A database serves as the basis for displaying exactly these complex relationships. We have the necessary experience in the construction of a complete, accurate mapping of the asset network as part of the aforementioned database, the so-called configuration management database (CMDB).
A configuration management database (CMDB) is used by an organization to store information about hardware and software assets, often referred to as configuration items (CI). It is useful to break down CIs into logical layers. This database acts as a data warehouse for the organization by storing information regarding the relationships among its assets. The CMDB provides a means of understanding the organization’s critical assets and their relationships, such as IT systems and dependencies of CIs.
The latest digital technologies are used for CMDBs so that maintenance-intensive and non-automated spreadsheet-based solutions (e.g., Excel) become fully obsolete.
In Part two of this series, we will delve into the process of determining the criticality of assets requirement protection.
Thanks for reading! If you want to learn more about Security, Risk and Compliance please visit our website or contact us on our social media.
