I view Information Technology Security Management from a
business risk management perspective. After all, in the modern enterprise,
every significant business process depends on information technology. Therefore
any risk to the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of digital assets
is a risk to the business.
But what is risk really? A practical definition would be the
probability and frequency of bad things happening and the resulting loss to the
business. From an IT perspective, the bad things are the disclosure, alteration, or destruction of
information based assets like intellectual property, customer information,
trends and projections, and financial, health, and personnel records. The
impact includes the costs of recovering from the incident and also loss of
reputation which often translates into lost revenue and profits and a drop in
stock price.
While I am going
to be spending most of my time on IT Security Risk, it’s obvious that there are
other types of IT Risks not to mention the myriad other business risks that
must be identified and managed as part of an overall risk management effort. For
a comprehensive analysis of IT Risk, you might consider IT Risk by George
Westerman and Richard Hunter, Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
