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Cyberattacks rank high among the risks businesses face today. Case in point: By February 2024, more than half of businesses and organizations globally had reported losing at least 300,000 U.S. dollars to cyber incident cases. Simultaneously, twelve percent of global organizations also reported losses above one million U.S. dollars. The numbers are striking and highlight the importance of having a strong cybersecurity strategy to remain competitive in this business.
To improve cybersecurity capabilities, organizations need to leverage the overlap between cybersecurity and IT service management. Although seemingly distinct domains, their overlap has mutual benefits. The implementation of ITSM processes from a cybersecurity perspective, helps the organization not only in effective service management but also increases their cyber security posture.
Let’s discuss how your organization can achieve this.
Incorporating Cybersecurity into your ITSM Processes
The ITSM framework of an organization determines the effectiveness of service delivery that an organization enjoys. By incorporating cybersecurity into your organization’s ITSM framework, you can ensure greater security and smooth service delivery.
Let’s discuss some key steps to achieve this:
Incorporate Security Incident Response into your Larger Incident Response Process
An incident response plan helps limit the impact of incidents on business activities, ultimately customers and employees, and recover from it while avoiding further instances through effective containment. Incorporating the security incident response process into the larger incident response process helps ensure that the two work in tandem and strengthen cybersecurity while improving ITSM. This entails defining clear roles and responsibilities for security teams, IT operations, and other relevant stakeholders, and conducting regular security incident response drills to test your team’s preparedness and identify areas for improvement.
Integrate your SOAR and Vulnerability Asset system into ITSM
Integrating SOAR and vulnerability asset systems into your ITSM framework helps reduce response times while allowing for proactive vulnerability management. Through SOAR, organizations can minimize manual intervention, leading to fewer errors and lower MTTR. Vulnerability asset systems help identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, thus helping your organization shift from a reactive to a proactive approach. Incorporating your vulnerability asset system into the ITSM framework helps ensure timely patching and configuration changes, ultimately reducing the attack surface.
Maintain Asset Inventory and Patch Compliance Levels in CMDB
Maintaining an up-to-date asset inventory in the CMDB helps organizations keep track of their assets and identify potential vulnerabilities while automating patch deployment and compliance monitoring processes helps to maintain compliance levels and protect systems with the latest security updates. Ensuring these measures collectively empowers organizations to provide smooth IT services while ensuring overall cybersecurity.
Incorporate Security into IT Change Management
Change management is a critical process that may pose the risk of exposure to vulnerabilities. To prevent this exposure, it is important for organizations to incorporate security considerations into the change management process. By involving security teams in the planning and approval stages and considering security risks before the implementation of changes, organizations can ensure that their ITSM can strengthen overall cybersecurity.
Incorporate Strong Access Controls
Data security is critical to every organization. Hence, the creation of strong access controls that limit the exposure of sensitive data helps organizations protect their data from reaching too many hands. Organizations can observe the principle of least privilege to reduce the attack surface. Deployment of MFA can provide an additional level of security to gain access, thus minimizing risks. Due consideration must be given to implementing strong access controls in all ITSM processes to avoid data loss and regulatory fines.
Conclusion
A holistic approach to IT service management that encompasses cybersecurity is more than just a best practice, it is the need of the hour. In the conduct of core business activities, organizations run the risk of data breaches, reputational damages, and delayed response times, which cripple productivity and business operations and lead to missed opportunities. Being deeply associated domains, the nature of overlap between ITSM and cybersecurity can provide greater insights into how organizations can improve in service management for ensuring organizational cybersecurity.
