Integrating Cyber Security, IT and Vendor Strategy for Improved Enterprise Risk Management
This year, United State’s President Joe Biden signed a cyber security executive order to increase scrutiny and raise the bars for software security standards. In this article, Christina Casino from Alyne’s Customer Success Team unpacks and explains Alyne’s approach that can help your organisation streamline and integrate IT, cyber security and vendor strategy all within a single SaaS platform.
President Biden Issued an Executive Order to Strengthen the United State’s Cyber Security
In May 2021, President Joe Biden signed a cyber security executive order to increase scrutiny on the private sector to improve information sharing, set higher software security standards and break down silos between the public and private sectors.
Later in August 2021, President of the United States Joe Biden met with tech, financial services, energy and utilities, and insurance CEOs. That includes the CEO of Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft to address the growing concerns about cyber security gaps in the private sector, especially with the high profile ransomware attacks this year.
“The reality is, most of our critical infrastructure owned and operated — is owned and operated by the private sector, and the federal government can’t meet this challenge alone. So I’ve invited you all here today because you have the power, the capacity, and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cyber security.”
– Joe Biden, President of the United States
What Are Leaders in the Big Tech Firms Pledging?
While the cyber security executive order offers no real incentives for tech leaders to improve the security posture in the U.S, following the summit, soome tech CEOs have agreed to commit to several cybersecurity investments, some of which are as follows:
- Google pledged a $10 billion investment over the next five years, in part to expand zero trust and improve open source security.
- Google also committed to training 100,000 Americans in areas including IT support and data privacy.
- Amazon will provide qualified AWS customers with a free multifactor authentication device and share its internal security training with the public.
Any Gaps in Your Cybersecurity Framework Are Likely to Have a Domino Effect on Your Enterprise Risk Management
Cyber security has become a growing concern within the government following the massive hack of government systems, including the Department of Defense, by Russian hackers in December 2020. With that in mind, current cyber security frameworks are often built with large corporations and critical infrastructure in mind rather than where a large portion of systems is located, which tends to be the small- to medium-sized businesses (SMEs).
With different organisations having unique organisational structures, risk profiles and implementation tiers, it is important for your organisation to acknowledge that cyber security frameworks are not “one-size-fits-all” that can instantly improve your end-to-end security and integrity.
Refining your Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Frameworks to Promote Greater Enterprise-Wide Risk Management
Resilient organisations are agile, proactive and collaborative. These qualities are especially crucial in a business environment defined by an increasing interconnectedness of people, process and technology— where uncertainty, risks and potential points of disruption have increased and where the accompanying size and nature of its impact are growing.
Alyne’s wide range of functionality allows our customers to adopt an integrated information technology system, cyber security, and vendor strategy, all within a single platform.
Alyne Content Library (Controls)
Our extensive Control Library, which provides IT and information security related Controls, is mapped to numerous US standards and regulations. Our customers are able to easily scope out Controls and regulations which are relevant to them and their industry in order to ensure they adhere accordingly. Alyne’s flexibility in the platform also allows customers to create their own Controls in the case where the Alyne Control Library may not 100% meet their unique requirements.
Alyne’s Out-of-the-Box Assessments
Alyne Controls offer out-of-the-box Assessment questions with unique answer options leveraging the CMMI as well as other maturity models to make assessing against Controls seamless.
Alyne Funnels
Alyne can be used for an end-to-end vendor management process from the risk classification stage to assessing vendors and managing associated risks. Leveraging our Funnel capability, our customers can triage their vendors into high, medium, and low risk in a consistent manner. Based on the calculated risk level, users can efficiently automate workflows as they send out-of-the-box (or custom) vendor risk assessments to each respective vendor.
On top of that, customers can also leverage Alyne’s Integration with Security Scorecard to configure their vendor management workflow and get instant and up-to-date ratings on their existing and new vendors through Security Scorecard.
All in all, Alyne’s wide range of functionality allows our customers to not focus on one particular use case to build out their security posture, but to also exhaust all functionalities to build an integrated IT, cyber and vendor governance strategy, all within one tool.
Written by Christina Casino in collaboration with Eunice Cheah.
