Top 2 Processes Information Security Teams Should Be Automating in 2021

For many organizations, information is the most valuable asset. With growing risks and increasing compliance measures, it becomes vital for information security teams to prevent unauthorized access to information and protect data from non-compliance. However, with reporting requirements becoming more stringent, increasing workloads, and year on year budget cuts, information security teams are being driven towards automating manual and tedious processes that are currently managed by offline tools like excel and word. Because of this, information security officers are spending more time on low value and repetitive tasks and less time on high-value strategic work.  

In this article, we’ve identified 2 areas where information security officers can automate their processes to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce time spent on low-value work, and improve compliance.

Read about how AssuranceLab automated Data Capture and Audit with Checkbox here.

The Vendor Audit Process

Increased regulatory obligations and adherence to internal governance policy requires organisations to mitigate vendor risk. New obligations from regulators, extend information & cybersecurity to third-party vendors to protect sensitive information and audit and assess a variety of control areas such as criticality of the vendor arrangement and the sensitivity of related data.

However, conducting vendor risk assessments and audits is a long and tedious process, especially given that large organizations may have hundreds of vendors. Further, the current methods of conducting vendor audits and assessments in email, spreadsheet, and SharePoint introduces risk, inefficiencies, and lack of centralized visibility and audit trails. This also means that the quality of work produced is poor and leaves room for serious notifiable data breaches.  

By automating the vendor audit process, information security teams can achieve faster turnaround times, eliminate the risk of error and improve maintainability, security, and client experience.

Learn more about how your team can automate the vendor audit process here.

Information Security Risk Assessment

Information security risk assessments identify, estimate, and prioritise risks to organisation operations and assets associated with the use of information systems. Potential risks that can result in major losses for the business can be mitigated by enhancing IT infrastructure and creating risk assessment solutions.

Methods of collecting information often consist of interviewing data owners and other employees, analysing systems and infrastructure, phone calls, and multiple emails. The time-consuming nature of this process leads to long queues for requests to review which delays the process of onboarding vendors and deploying IT systems or infrastructures. Risk assessments also need to be customized for each organization and are dependent on the scale and complexity of the IT systems which often reveals gaps in current risk assessment solutions, exposing the organisation to risk. Furthermore, assessments that are high-risk often get prioritized, leaving low to medium risk assessments to be rushed and not fully compliant with governance policies.  

By automating and building risk assessment solutions, teams can create bespoke security assessment in just a few days, reduce errors, improve maintainability, and make better-informed business decisions.  

Learn more about how your team can automate Risk Assessments here.