Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By : Joseph MacMillan
Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By: Joseph MacMillan

Overview of this book

Information security and risk management best practices enable professionals to plan, implement, measure, and test their organization's systems and ensure that they're adequately protected against threats. The book starts by helping you to understand the core principles of information security, why risk management is important, and how you can drive information security governance. You'll then explore methods for implementing security controls to achieve the organization's information security goals. As you make progress, you'll get to grips with design principles that can be utilized along with methods to assess and mitigate architectural vulnerabilities. The book will also help you to discover best practices for designing secure network architectures and controlling and managing third-party identity services. Finally, you will learn about designing and managing security testing processes, along with ways in which you can improve software security. By the end of this infosec book, you'll have learned how to make your organization less vulnerable to threats and reduce the likelihood and impact of exploitation. As a result, you will be able to make an impactful change in your organization toward a higher level of information security.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Information Security Risk Management and Governance
4
Section 2: Closing the Gap: How to Protect the Organization
8
Section 3: Operationalizing Information Security

Identifying and classifying information assets

In your asset management policies, it's likely that you have defined the way your organization is going to identify and classify information assets based on the value, criticality, sensitivity, and legal obligations, but not specifically discussing how your organization might do that from an IT perspective.

While creating that policy and defining those motives is a huge leap forward in understanding the overall position your organization takes when it comes to their risk appetite and what is considered to be the most valuable information they have, remember that it's also just the "rule," and not the actual action of identifying and classifying those assets or protecting them for that matter.

In this section, I would like to detail the ways we can structure the rules, as well as the actual "doing" part of an effective identification and classification phase of an ISMS.

This includes the following...