Steve Purser

We began this series of articles with the observation that recent advances in the area of network technology and the success of the Internet have resulted in a new business model. This new model has resulted in a number of new challenges in the area of information security which, although largely understood, are only partially resolved. As a result, information security-related risk has been growing rapidly in the last few years and companies will need to take a more proactive stance to managing this risk in order to continue to enjoy the benefits that technological advances have made possible.

Previous articles in this series have outlined the challenges facing the present-day information security manager, presented an approach to meeting these challenges and analysed the purpose of the consolidation phase in some detail. We now turn our eyes to the second phase of the approach – the strategic planning cycle.

The previous article in this series described an overall approach to securing information and provided a high-level description of the consolidation period and the strategic planning cycle. We continue this development by taking a more detailed look at the consolidation period.

In the first article of this series, we identified and provided examples of the types of issues that need to be resolved if organisations are to correctly manage risk in the area of information security. If we combine the impact of these trends and issues with the fact that most enterprises are being forced to cut costs in order to remain competitive the true magnitude of the problem becomes apparent. Simply put, information security managers have to secure more complex environments, faster and using less resources.