Ensuring It Security

Ensuring It Security
IT security teams have a hard time these days, especially with the new security threats popping up each day. However, keeping company data shielded against threats is not their only concern. They also have to make sure that data is available to relevant employees at the right time. Walking this fine line between security and accessibility of sensitive information is of primary concern to security professionals.

Another setback that IT security teams frequently have to struggle with is the lack of technical knowledge in most employees. In fact, while a number of senior employees in an organization may have excellent competency in their fields of expertise, many of them may not be able to differentiate between a firewall and an antivirus. Getting these people to work with the enforced security measures is a challenge for any IT security team.

In spite of these problems, however, a well organized approach may allow network and system administrators to ensure IT security in an organization more smoothly. One of the proper approaches would involve breaking up the total process of ensuring IT security in three different stages, like the ones given below.

Stage 1: Understanding the prerequisites

This is the stage where the entire team will have to understand the requirements of the organization. They will have to make note of which data has to be made available to which employees, which kind of access protection will have to be implemented, and which data will have to be kept accessible by everyone. Documentation of every employee s requirements and verification of the same by system and network managers will be crucial for the success of this stage.

If system and network security have not been enforced earlier, then this stage may take a long time to be completed, depending on the employee strength of the organization. However, the tradeoff should be well worth the man days spent on the task.

Stage 2: Planning

The planning stage is when the IT security team will start creating an outline of the measures that they will have to implement. System and network engineers will prove to be invaluable assets during this stage, as they will be able to point out possible problems that may occur with the planned set up. That way, network and system administrators will be able to devise ways to counter those problems, before those even occur in reality.

Any sort of improvement in existing infrastructure, or upgrading of hardware or software components will also need to be planned during this stage, and appropriately documented. These documentations will have to be approved by the network and system managers.

Stage 3: Implementation

Once the plans are prepared and sanctioned, the IT security team will be able to get to implement the security measures. If new hardware or software components are to be installed, then those will have to be installed and checked to ensure compatibility with the existing infrastructure. After that, the team will be able to concentrate on enforcing data security, based on the requirements of individual employees. The IT security team may come across several critical problems during this stage, which they will have to overcome. Once the stage is over, they will also have to educate the employees about proper ways of accessing data, to ensure that they are able to work as per the security protocols enforced.

Once these three stages are completed, the security of sensitive data in the organization will be ensured. Ensuring data security for an organization is not an easy task by any means. However, with careful planning and perseverance, it can indeed be achieved.


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