The role goes over and beyond the regular duties of the IT department. An extreme level of protection for integrity and confidentiality of information within the entire organization is needed, which requires continuous control and monitoring.
Data Priority Treatment By ISMS
Although ISMS defines how to protect your organizational data, it does not treat all the information equally. Since companies generate, record, and exchange varied types of data around the year, it is not feasible to mark all data under the same priority level.
Financial and productivity costs are associated with deploying tools and procedures to protect certain types of data. This makes organization leaders the best decision-makers to analyze and elect through their risk assessments. They guide and infirm the ISMS Team as to which data needs utmost security and may lead to irreversible damage in case of a breach.
Importance Of ISMS
Protection Of Sensitive Data:
Proprietary information assets like personnel, financial, and other intellectual property that clients or third parties have entrusted are carefully protected against all cyber threats. An ISMS provides high controls and helps to monitor endpoint against malicious attacks, safeguarding the business system as a whole.
Maintaining Business Continuity:
All companies aim for business continuity. By making ISMS an integral part of their business operations and processes, companies can amp up their level of security and alleviate information security hazards. This focuses on the proactive approach of counteracting the risk of security incidents that may disrupt business continuity.
Compliance Requirements:
ISMS ensures that companies meet all contractual and regulatory requirements since any violation can result in heavy fines. This gives more legal and operational certainty to companies serving in highly regulated sectors such as finance.
Enhanced Cost-Effectiveness:
ISMS helps to set priorities right, use resources judiciously and make investments in the right places. In addition, the risk-oriented planning and structured coordination measures offered via ISMS helps to mitigate any unexpected costs in the long term.
Avoid Expensive Data Breaches:
Companies who have experienced a data breach where a major chunk of their customers had their data stolen can vouch for the importance of ISMS. To start with, you should be aware data breaches are incredibly expensive. In addition to data recovery costs, there are expenses associated with alerting your clients and inform that their data was compromised. Furthermore, bringing in security experts to patch the security entry points and vulnerabilities that led to the breach can make a huge hole in your pocket.
Reputation Loss
When customers experience the threat of data loss, they start to question the integrity of the company. This affects the business reputation and may lead to the loss of trustworthy customers in the long term. In addition, the potential loss of data due to a system outage can have significant image loss.