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

Best practices in performing security assessments

Regardless of whether your organization is undertaking an internal assessment or has engaged a third party to assess its Information Security posture, there are a few best practices that are effective in ensuring that the value of the assessment being undertaken is maximized.

The key takeaways are as follows:

  • Ensure the engagement has enough time to be completed thoroughly. There is no point in rushing, but additionally, it's important to ensure the test doesn't drag along and that you keep your valuable IT and security staff occupied on the assessment rather than their day-to-day requirements.
  • Ensure the test scope is defined to avoid irrelevant assessments.
  • Ensure the tester and internal staff assisting the tester are well-trained, prepared, and knowledgeable to increase the value of the assessment.

There are also some processes that can be utilized in order to effectively choose the appropriate...