‘Your Password Expires Today’ and Other Notifications You Can’t Ignore

Company Culture Integrated with Information Security

How many times have you heard an employee grumble, “Not again,” after coming across the message in this title? While information security should be the backbone of your organization’s strategy, policies and procedures, many employees view these reminders as another alert that’s occupying their inbox and notifications panels. The truth is that business today is built on information security and its importance in building trust with your customers can’t be understated. As more and more companies adopt IoT technologies and organizations rely heavily on data from various sources and data stored in the cloud, the need to ensure that data stays secure becomes paramount. Everyone from customers to employees must be made aware of the importance of keeping data secured and mitigating potential threats. That’s why it’s important for YOU to set the precedent at an organizational level and make information security a part of your company’s culture.?

?Building Secure Customer Experience

?For starters, information security is not a band aid - a proper information security strategy needs to be built out as an all-encompassing policy framework that factors in segregation of duties, identify and access management, data life cycle management, data de-identification, service management that supports user experience, measurement & monitoring, and reporting, as well as being flexible enough to grow and adapt. This starts with understanding an organization’s responsibilities (compliance and governance) in the planning stage while creating trust through data ethics and building positive employee habits that align with your organization’s information security culture. In healthcare, building patients’ trust is paramount to providing effective care. Going back to our password example, while care providers might not have the luxury of time when working with their patients, it’s important to develop and incentivize positive behaviors by understanding their world and walking in their shoes to appreciate what they are dealing with every day. Whether through development of secure tools that make it easy for providers across the care continuum to deliver care, internal recognition or performance programs, employees who do a good job with adherence to infosec policy will not only understand the importance to the organization but also the importance of adherence to their personal brand. I’ve spoken about incentivizing employees in the past and stand by the overall good that it brings to an organization. These steps help make your employees your primary ambassadors for your organization’s information security standard and in turn help nurture the trust that your patients have in you.??

Amazing Customer Experience Necessitates Evolution of Information Security

On the more technical side of the coin, it’s important to understand and leverage current and cutting-edge technologies to help bolster your information security posture. The interconnected approach to business today requires that organizations share data while adhering to confidentiality and privacy regulations in their respective geo location. Differential Privacy policies can help organizations share personal information with stakeholders while keeping their customers’ information private and harder to intercept by an attacker. While this approach may sacrifice some of the data’s accuracy, it is better positioned to protect said data. Additionally, organizations must accept that the future of information security policy has become increasingly dependent on AI to fight off AI-based attackers. The risks involved with super intelligent AI attacks could be potentially more damaging than traditional cybersecurity threats of yesteryear.?

When customers trust a service, product, or brand, they look to it for guidance into the future. It’s important for your organization to go beyond risk-based tactics to strategies that are embedded into the platform and engineered to scale with the evolving threat landscape. Additionally, it’s important for you to lead with empathy, and fully embrace your role as your organization and client’s most trusted source for information security - use business impact as the basis for the process; people, and technology to drive transformation. By instilling this trust among both internal and external stakeholders, you can develop a strategy that goes beyond a risk-based approach to security and build a company culture where information security is a tenant of doing business. After all, a vigilant business is a resilient business.