Monthly Archives: September 2019

Service Management: How is it that the promise of ITIL and IT service management is so elusive?

Service integration and management (SIAM) is an approach to managing multiple suppliers of services (business services as well as information technology services) and integrating them to provide a single business-facing it organization, ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists that can be applied by an organization for establishing integration with its own strategies, delivering value, and maintaining a minimum level of competency.

The service catalog is the source of information on all it services in operation or being prepared for operation and identifies status, interfaces, dependencies, delivery levels, and other changeable attributes and for successful change management in an Agile environment, since the idea of Agile development is to enable and encourage product or application owners to change their minds, change management in an Agile context should be smooth and natural.

An ITIL change management process can be a daunting task for system administrators because it may include changing a whole or part of your organizations it systems infrastructure.

Understanding and effectively managing the operations side of your organization is key to running a successful business, creating a service level agreement is an important process that should always be present whenever there is a transaction happening between a service provider and a service user, so then you should explore how technology can support the business strategy, the role of technology managers in business operations, and ways you can leverage technology to solve common business problems.

Intelligent self-service, machine learning, and advanced analytics are all parts of AI, which is making its way into IT (broadly) and service management (specifically), along that journey, project management involves balancing tradeoffs between cost, time, and scope.

For example, many organizations experience great difficulties to automate processes of custody and management of documentation, this makes the time ripe for Access Management and governance solutions to get into the heart of your organization and unshackle identity management over the cloud.

Statistical reports need to provide top management with an overview of the current status and the progress of users in identifying and reporting phishing attacks and adapting safe habits, in particular, with customer service management, you connect customer service with other departments to identify and resolve issues faster, reduce costs, and increase satisfaction.

Management must own the risks in the cloud and management of the relevant business unit must own the risk associated with its use of cloud services, and must establish, direct, monitor and evaluate commensurate risk management on an on-going basis especially now that improving information management practices is a key focus for many organizations, across both the public and private sectors.

IT Vendor Management: Is your organization relying more heavily on third parties now than it was five years ago?

Managing third-party vendors is a fact of life for many organizations, and one factor that is important to consider (yet often overlooked) is whether one or more of your vendors may be vulnerable to outside intrusion in any way, and equally important is a validation process to verify that your systems are compliant and function according to specifications.

Vendor policies and procedures, providing training to all responsible parties related to vendor management within the organization, monitoring vendor-related litigation or regulatory issues, and monitoring contract terms and service level agreements, by bringing together industry-specific skills in technology, regulatory compliance, financial and accounting and other business processes, you assess your third party risk management program, not to mention, as organizations continue to outsource, form partnerships and share data with third parties, a strong vendor risk management program that stays ahead or risks in the information supply chain has to be a top priority.


Today, more than ever before, a programmatic approach to identity and access management is singularly important to the safety and security of your organization and critical assets, the HIPAA security rule requires covered entities to assess data security controls by conducting a risk assessment, and implement a risk management program to address any vulnerabilities that are identified, to begin with, understanding the true return on your investment with a vendor is crucial to making solid business decisions.

With an enterprise contract management platform, legal can pull data on how different indemnity clauses have performed to choose the best language, identify suppliers or customers with reputational issues using data from third parties, and assign precise risk ratings to contracts or classes of contracts as a whole, while project management is basically ensuring that the companys KPI requirements are met, some of the trends in the industry seem to be evolving towards the more intangible side of a project and its team, rather than just plain metrics, as a rule, no matter how many new tools you install, settings you adjust, or events you remediate, there are few ways to objectively determine your security posture and that of your vendors and third parties.

Importantly, security ratings have proven useful for more than just analyzing third-party vendor risk, therefore, view it vendor risk in the purview of the larger third-party risk management program.

Some enterprise privilege session management solutions also enable IT teams to pinpoint suspicious session activity in-progress, and pause, lock, or terminate the session until the activity can be adequately evaluated, now, it is more critical than ever for them to plan and execute leadership programs and initiatives that have a positive impact on your organization and its leaders, additionally, an audit of the personal data your organization holds and the flow of personal data both within your organization and between your organization and third parties will be critical to implementing an effective process.

What is more, in some organizations individual business units have different ways of tracking suppliers, making it difficult to compare and collate them across an entire organization, so today, risk management continues to demand greater attention from boards of directors.

Strategy Execution: Where does the policy/strategy idea come from?

Strategic management involves setting objectives, analyzing the competitive environment, analyzing the internal organization, evaluating strategies and ensuring that management rolls out the strategies across the organization, the most important difference between a push and pull strategy, is that in Push strategy, the idea is to push your organizations product onto customers by making them aware of it, at the point of purchase therefore with a well-considered new product development (NPD) strategy, you can avoid wasting time, money and business resources.

A swot analysis is a great exercise to go through because it identifies the key areas of the organization that may need targeted resources as well as opportunities or opposing environmental factors that could affect organizational strategy, its roots are usually found in a Grow the Business strategic theme and/or an Operational Excellence strategic theme in which transformation through innovation is a key driver.

Invite all of your stakeholders and partners to also adopt such priorities and join you in building a stronger organization and a more prepared and resilient organization.

Marketing strategy is a collection of techniques that enable a particular organization to direct its resources towards the best opportunities in terms of increasing sales and achieving sustainable advantage over the competition, each project is, hopefully, tied into to the direction, strategic goals, and vision for the whole organization, as part of the portfolio of projects for your organization.

Staff engagement generates additional input and helps build commitment to the end plan,while the strategy of your organization is reflective of the thinking of those at the top of its management and the action that the management plans to take, but in the first place, when new creative ideas come flowing in, the next step is to create gates that allow purposeful review of the already stated ideas, so that budgets for new projects can be allocated correctly.

The real action takes place in the strategic management process, since this is where the tactics in the strategic plan will be transformed into actions or actual performance, however, going into any expenditure without knowing where the budget line is drawn is a super bad idea.

Design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organizational change but also, while your organization plan outlines your entire business and a financial plan shows where the money will come from and go, the execution plan outlines what specifically needs to be done and when.

It could be as simple as a story defining the problem your customers have, the solution your business offers, and the factors that make your business especially suited to offer the solution, but your short range strategy is defined as a period of time extending about one year or less in the future, at this point, you should have a pretty good idea.

Cybersecurity Center: When you talk about cyber-security risk management, what do you mean?

In terms of the cyber-risk landscape, you want to look at global cybersecurity trends, cybercrime costs, and reported attacks and breaches (broken down globally, by region, or by industry), firstly, it is important to recognize the cyber-risk and threat, and then it would be easier to establish a cyber-security strategy, objectives, vision, and mission while it is worth noticing that cyber security insurance offers the ability to transfer that risk to an insurance company that can help you with everything from covering lost revenue to providing incident response as soon as you detect an attack.

Design a customized cyber risk assessment and insurance program to help your organization manage cyber risk with confidence and provides cybersecurity professionals with detailed cyber-risk information which enables them to report on any aspect easily and simply, be that for an audit or your Board of Directors, as a rule however, businesses need a cybersecurity strategy to protect business, customers, and data from growing cybersecurity threats.

Security safeguards are a key element of the ability to protect personal information and preserve privacy in cyberspace, with technical safeguards being only one aspect of an overall risk management approach to cyber security and personal information protection, use tools to help you assess and measure the potential financial impact of cyber events, and tailor risk mitigation and transfer programs to optimize your cybersecurity investment.

Overseeing cyber risk is a huge challenge, strategies include appropriate handling of data, continued diagnostics and good processes and procedures to manage your intellectual property and other sensitive information, moreover, the cyber security landscape is always changing as hackers find new ways to access information, which is why creating a culture of consistent awareness of threats is so important.

The use case should also include a risk register to catalog IT risks, pre-built risk assessments for IT, a pre-built threat assessment methodology and a catalog to document IT controls, coverage should include computer hardware, software, mobile apps and devices, personal technology, cybersecurity and emerging tech.

With an established Center of Excellence for Governance, Risk and Compliance, your practitioners provide strategic insights and advisory services to tackle risk and compliance challenges across the enterprise, while Risk Treatment has to take place at the level of the executive management of the organization, Risk Acceptance concerns the communication of residual risks to the decision makers.

Although there are many components to risk management, focus on data breaches in particular, this includes a vast array of sophisticated detection and prevention technologies, a virtual ocean of cyber intelligence reporting, and access to a rapidly expanding workforce of talented IT professionals and consequently, from your data center provider to your organizations wireless network, customized security questionnaires may be needed to assess specific IT security vulnerabilities.

Taking a framework approach to risk management offers a structured way to identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover from any security incident your business may face, to solve security issues and to provide a rapid solution and response to security related problems, most companies are setting up Security Operations Center (SOC) and finally, promotion of cyber-security awareness would be effective at all levels, both in business practices and the interface with customers.

GDPR: Does the model propose layered/tiered access?

While you need cyber security training for GDPR compliance in the rush to ensure compliance with the finer points of the new GDPR legislation, some organizations overlook the basic requirements for cyber security training to ensure data is handled properly, GDPR requires that controllers hold and process only the minimum data required, and limiting access to personal data as needed for processing.

According to the GDPR, the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, consequently, companies already have to deal with conflicting compliance regulations in a range of areas, the thing they need is a layer of transparency into their organization with the data regulations on top of this.

Ensuring that users have the proper authority to see the data, load new data, or update existing data is an important aspect of application development, the HIPAA security rule requires covered entities to assess data security controls by conducting a risk assessment, and implement a risk management program to address any vulnerabilities that are identified, hence Introduction to security when you create systems that store and retrieve data, it is important to protect the data from unauthorized use, disclosure, modification or destruction.

Risk management has become an important component of software development as organizations continue to implement more applications across a multiple technology, multi-tiered environment, data collected at each tier are used to measure the efficacy of the supports so that meaningful decisions can be made about which instruction and interventions should be maintained and layered. Multi-layered security then is a network security approach that uses a number of components to protect clients operations with multiple levels of security measures.

For access to infrastructure tools, servers, and similar services, access is minimized to only the individuals whose jobs require it.