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

Understanding the different types of security assessments

There are various security assessments available that can help you understand any of the following:

  • Your entire organization's security posture
  • Your hardware product's security control effectiveness
  • Your software product's security control effectiveness
  • Your building's security
  • Your staff's security awareness
  • Your security staff's ability to respond to an active threat

Beyond that list, there are various methods in performing these types of assessments, including having your own staff members perform an internal review, or having another organization perform a third-party review. Furthermore, automated testing can be performed.

Internal reviews are effective in reducing costs, and in some circumstances, they can save time, providing the internal team is well-acquainted with the processes they are reviewing. However, internal reviews lack objectivity...