What is Information Security Management?

Information security management is the process of protecting an organization’s data and assets against potential threats. One of the primary goals of these processes is to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Information security management may be driven both internally by corporate security policies and externally by regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The Importance of Information Security Management

The average organization collects a great deal of data. This includes sensitive customer data, intellectual property, and other data that is vital to an organization’s competitive advantage and ability to operate.

The value of this data means that it is under constant threat of being stolen by cybercriminals or encrypted by ransomware. An effective security management architecture is vital because organizations need to take steps to secure this data to protect themselves and their customers.

Objectives of Information Security Management

The objective of information security management is to protect data:

• Confidentiality: Protecting data confidentiality requires restricting access to data to only authorized users. Data breaches are a breach of confidentiality.
• Integrity: Ensuring data integrity requires the ability to ensure that data is accurate and complete. A cyber threat actor that corrupts data in an organization’s databases is a breach of data integrity.
• Availability: Data and the services that rely upon it must be available to authorized users, whether inside or outside of the company. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an example of a threat against the availability of an organization’s data and services.

The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s data can be threatened in various ways. Information security management involves identifying the potential risks to an organization, assessing their likelihood and potential impact, and developing and implementing remediation strategies designed to decrease risk as much as possible with available resources.

Information Security Management Standards and Compliance

An organization’s information security management strategy may be driven by multiple different factors. The program may be inspired by internal policies or required by external forces. Both of these potential drivers have associated standards and compliance.

In some cases, an organization’s internal security policies and business goals may require implementation of info security management systems. For example, ISO 27001, an international standard describing security best practices, mandates the implementation of an information security management system. Companies that want to certify against ISO 27001 will need to implement it.

An organization’s security management program may also be driven by external factors. For example, many organizations operate under one or more data protection regulations.

Some common examples include:

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) : Protects the personally identifiable information (PII) of EU citizens with strong personal privacy and data security requirements.
• Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA) : A US regulation for the healthcare industry that mandates security controls for protected health information (PHI).
• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) : A regulation developed by the financial sector to prevent fraud by protecting the personal data of payment card holders.

These and other data privacy laws may explicitly or implicitly require the implementation of an info security management program. Even if such a program is not explicitly required, complying with regulatory data security requirements scalably and sustainably makes implementing strong security management processes and procedures necessary.

Benefits of Information Security Management

In addition to improving an organization’s data security, an infosec management program can provide the following benefits:

• Streamlined Data Security: An information security management program creates a framework and process for assessing data security risks and remediating them. Adopting such a program can make data security more efficient and effective by enabling an organization to optimize its security architecture and eliminate unnecessary and overlapping solutions.
• Improved Security Culture: Often, infosec is owned by the IT or security department, and it is difficult to spread and enforce across the organization. Educating employees about the company’s information security management program can improve security and create a more positive security culture.
• Discovery of external risks: Often, an infosec team scans the open, deep and dark web for information leakages such as leaked source code and leaked credential. When found these can be quickly remediated.
• Brand Image: Data breaches and other security incidents can harm an organization’s brand image. Demonstrated compliance with security best practices can help an organization’s reputation and improve relationships with customers and partners.

Information Security Management with Check Point

Check Point has many solutions that can help keep your organization’s information safe. Check Point Exposure management maps your external attack surface (including leaked code, credentials and more) and your internal attack surface. It prioritizes your risk using agentic capabilities and then safely remediates it.

To learn more about how Check Point can enhance and enable your organization’s information security management, we invite you to download our security management whitepaper. Then, feel free to sign up for a demo to see Check Point’s unified cybersecurity platform in action.