Outsourcing is a critical part of business management and an important ingredient in business growth. One business outsources some task to another — but that second firm can also delegate some of its own business processes to yet another company. That last company then becomes a fourth-party to the first. As the role of fourth-party vendors expands, having a vendor risk management strategy in place becomes key to organizational success.

A data-centric security model moves your cybersecurity away from protecting the place where your data is stored to focus instead on securing the data itself. With cloud computing, there no longer is a single perimeter within which to secure your sensitive information. By protecting the data itself, you assure that no matter where the data goes, your organization is protected against cyber threats.

As cyberattacks continue to proliferate, it’s clear that organizations must be prepared from both cybersecurity and compliance standpoints. It’s critical, however, to understand that while data security and compliance are both important for risk management and the prevention and mitigation of cyber attacks, the two concepts are definitely not the same.

Today’s organizations are vulnerable to all kinds of cyberattacks, which NIST (the National Institute of Standards & Technology) defines as an event that disrupts, disables, destroys, or maliciously controls a computing environment, destroys data integrity, or steals controlled information. Expert security teams know that attackers might compromise the enterprise network, systems, or applications; or steal data at any time through any number of means.

Compliance is an essential part of any business. From a corporate perspective, it can be defined as ensuring your company and employees follow all laws, regulations, standards, policies and ethical practices that apply to your organization. In the context of information security, it means ensuring your organization meets the standards for data privacy and security that apply to your specific industry.

Conducting a regular risk assessment is an integral part of any organization’s overall risk management program — and sometimes even a legal requirement, depending on your industry, contractual obligations, or the number of persons you employ. A risk assessment is the systematic process of identifying threats or hazards in your work environment, evaluating the potential severity of those risks, and then implementing reasonable control measures to mitigate or remediate the risks.

Learn about the methods cybercriminals use to exploit passive and active attack vectors so you can better protect your business or organization from cyberattacks. Cybercriminals will use any means they can to penetrate your corporate IT assets and exploit any vulnerabilities they find. Your ability to predict and prepare for these incidents could mean the difference between preventing a data breach and recovering from one.

Risk is inherent to all businesses, regardless of your industry — and to prevent those risks from causing harm, you must first know what threats you are facing. The foundation of any successful risk management program is a thorough risk assessment, which can take many forms depending on what methodology best suits your needs.

Enterprise organizations and government agencies worldwide are focused on strengthening their computer networks against the risk of a cyberattack. However, a cybersecurity program is only as strong as its weakest link – and that link is often an employee. Yes, employees remain the biggest cybersecurity threat today. So, in addition to putting the right security controls and tools in place, your Information Security team needs to create a more risk-aware culture.

Around the world, and particularly over the past few years, regulators have been looking for ways to strengthen the resilience of the financial sector. In the European Union, regulators within the European Commission (EC) have taken a concrete step to meet this objective through the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). The EC published a draft version of DORA in September 2020.