Best Practices for Communicating SecOps to the Board
SecOps is a combined super-team of cybersecurity professionals from both Security and IT Operations sectors, thus, the conjunction of Security and Operations to form SecOps. SecOps teams are responsible for a wide range of cybersecurity management activities such as protection, threat prevention, compliance, communication and more, and are often wholly responsible for an organization’s entire cybersecurity ecosystem.
Communicating Security Operations with your board of directors is an integral part of any business operation. In order to keep things running smoothly and to ensure cyber threats have minimal impact on your day-to-day, it’s important to make sure that board members are kept up-to-date with the latest SecOps information, and that they actually understand it. Consider these best practices for communicating SecOps with your Board of Directors:
Talk resilience. John Matthews, a seasoned Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), says in a Forbes article from 2019, “encourage the board to look at how the organization is equipped to respond when the inevitable occurs—including how it will recover.” Matthews alludes to the inevitably of cyber incidents and notes that leading with your organization’s resilience structure is a solid plan that provides a sense of comfort for board members. When they know that there are plans in place to lessen the harm of breaches to your organization, it’s easier for them to make decisions.
Tie incidents to business impacts. Speaking in numbers is a great, easy-to-understand way to demonstrate the potential impact of different cyber threats. When communicating these threats with your board, emphasize the potential business impacts of each threat by classifying and prioritizing them based on potential consequences. Follow that up with a solid plan of action, making sure that you’re clear about how you can prevent that threat from doing any damage to the business.
Avoid tech jargon. Your goal here is communication, so it’s wise to avoid using a lot of technical jargon that non-IT individuals on the board might not understand. Use clear, plain language to make sure that everyone is on the same page!
Use visual aids. It’s often easier to communicate something when it’s accompanied by visuals. By using a platform like ServiceNow’s Security Operations, you’re able to present clear, actionable information to your board by using dashboards, graphs and charts, all grouped together in one place for easy access.
Consider automation. Offer board members peace-of-mind by proposing the automation of your organization’s incident response. ServiceNow’s Security Operations solution brings critical threats to the forefront by automating and simplifying information. This allows teams to quickly prioritize and remediate complex incidents, while also understanding the context behind certain threats—making it easier to respond efficiently to future incidents.
ServiceNow Security Operations makes it easier to communicate SecOps with your board by providing all the tools you need to collect and present your data in a way that everyone can understand; automate your processes; and analyze incidents so that you can see how much they may affect your business—so you can focus on high value efforts and provide trustworthy information to your board of directors, so they can make confident decisions.
Iceberg Networks can help you mature your cyber risk program to better communicate SecOps using the ServiceNow platform. Read more about how Iceberg can take help your organization reach optimal protection or reach out to speak with one of our many subject matter experts.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Risk Intelligence Academy – Iceberg Networks authored by Meaghan O'brien. Read the original post at: https://icebergnetworks.com/best-practices-for-communicating-secops-to-the-board/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=best-practices-for-communicating-secops-to-the-board
