Importance of Assessing your Current Infrastructure with International Standards Frameworks
According to the research and markets, Saudi Arabia is projected to adopt technologies like IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud computing across several countries. Due to this, the country can soon experience high cyber-attacks and threats in the current months or upcoming years.
Yet, there is no need to worry because one can invest in the quality infrastructure designed as per the international standards and by leveraging the best practices from end-users, communities, citizens to even governments can gain as many benefits and protect organizations from cyber threats.
Thinking about private investment is also critical to ensure that infrastructure projects that are prepared by governments or infrastructure services that companies offer are thoroughly planned, manageable, and readily available in a transparent manner. These practices should also comply in order to obtain social and environmental protection along with a sustainable climate.
Importance of Using the Best IT Infrastructure & Framework
Technology plays a critical role in every business. Whether it is the matter of employee tasks, operations, or offering goods and services, using the optimized technology is necessary to create efficiencies, enhance communications and productivity.
Similarly, an IT infrastructure should be secure, reliable, and flexible enough to help enterprises fulfill their unique goals. It can even helps in gaining a competitive edge in the market. However, businesses can face productivity, connectivity, and security issues like breaches or system disruptions when not executing the right IT infrastructure.
On the other hand, with the ideal IT infrastructure, your company can:
- Give a positive experience when customers access your online store and the website.
- Rapidly build and release solutions to market.
- Gather real-time data to make quick and business-oriented decisions.
- Improve workforce productivity.
Besides, one must also invest in a good cybersecurity framework because it helps you understand your security status and ensures to improve your cybersecurity program. One of the best parts of cybersecurity frameworks is they are generally suitable for all organizations, regardless of their sizes, sectors, and maturity.
The cyber security framework has also helped organizations incorporate their functions into the management toolkit and leadership vocabulary. Moreover, it helps focus on the current business climate, risk management, and governance strategies.
With this framework, you can even create road maps and profiles to identify your improvement efforts and make investment decisions to eliminate gaps. Apart from that, it assists in embracing opportunities for revised and new standards and makes it easy for your company to inform stakeholders about cybersecurity requirements.
SAMA (the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority) also created the cyber security framework regulated by the member organizations of SAMA to help financial institutions locate and resolve their cybersecurity risks. In order to protect the online services and information assets, the member organizations must adopt the framework because its objective is to develop a unified approach for addressing cyber security and lets you obtain a sustainable level of cyber security controls within the membership.
Similarly, avoiding the cyber security risks is effortless because the framework is established as per the requirements of SAMA and the industry’s cyber security standards, such as ISO, NIST, ISF, PCI, and BASEL.
Reasons to Use a Cybersecurity Framework
A cybersecurity framework is a set of guidelines, standards, and best practices needed by security leaders across nations to manage risks that occur in the digital world. With this framework, organizations can leverage the defined procedures and processes to evaluate, monitor, and minimize cybersecurity risks. Furthermore, the purpose of the framework is to help you work on your company’s weaknesses and avoid cyberattacks.
With a cybersecurity framework, one can easily find the areas that can make the data breaches happen and determine other non-compromising activities performed by hackers or cyber criminals.
Some of the common frameworks to reduce cyber risks are as follow:
NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The NIST cybersecurity framework is a robust tool to arrange and improve your cybersecurity program. It is a set of practices and guidelines that organizations can consider to develop and enhance their cybersecurity posture. It also provides some recommendations that one can follow to identify and detect cyber-attacks in an efficient way. Moreover, the guidelines are convenient to understand how to respond, protect, and stay away from cyber incidents.
SOC2
SOC (Service Organization Control) Type 2 is a trustworthy cybersecurity framework and an auditing procedure introduced by the American Institution of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) for partners and vendors that are looking for the framework to manage their sensitive information and client’s data. It is ideal mainly for the banking and finance sectors because they require a higher compliance standard than other sectors. And the best part is SOC2 has an extensive auditing process with the ability to define over 60 compliance requirements to handle third-party systems and risk management programs.
ISO 27001 and 27002
ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 certifications were developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and are known as the international standard to verify a cybersecurity program both internally and throughout third parties. With an ISO certification, businesses can show their customers, board of directors, shareholders, and partners that they are implementing the right strategies or performing the right things to lessen cyber risks. The drawback of these processes or standards is that they are time-consuming and require more resources. Yet, to gain business benefits and stay ahead in the competition, one should consider ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 for consistent monitoring of risks and keep the company away from cyber attacks, data leaks, hacking, or theft.
Are you looking for the experts to improve the cybersecurity of your mobile and web applications? Consult with one of our cybersecurity specialists at Alareeb ICT to make cyber security a top priority in your digital transformation or any other services. As the leading corporate governance organization, we have the best strategies and top governance service providers to help your company develop an IT governance framework and ensure that it will fully comply with international standards. Our IT governance services experts also leverage the various frameworks from COBIT, ITIL to Val IT to help your company achieve strategic goals and make it effortless for you to survive in a competitive environment.
For more information regarding the international standard frameworks and cybersecurity, you can schedule a quick consultation call with us. Also, download our latest eBook on mobile and web apps to know how Alareeb ICT helps organizations develop strategies to make their application stand out from the crowd.
