Organizations are always searching for ways to clean up their processes, improve their incident response capabilities and provide more reliable network services.
One way to do that is to converge networking and security teams.
One of the first products of the collaboration is combined leadership in networking and cybersecurity that does the defining.
This group should include people from across the existing organizations.
The more people understand the objectives and goals of the effort, the constraints of budget and staff, operational requirements, and the logic of the new organization, the better they can align their own efforts to meet those goals and achieve those objectives.
Create the teams overseeing how the new department will work.
At the same time, define tiger teams to identify and execute on quick wins.
One major challenge to converging network and security teams is organizational.
Networking teams usually report to a director or vice president who reports to the CIO, while cybersecurity teams often report to a CISO. Merging the teams means picking one as the path to the C-level or building a matrix structure.
Network budgets are flat or in decline for most organizations, as are staff levels.
Cybersecurity budgets, on the other hand, are mostly still growing, as are teams when anyone can be found to fill open positions.
A combined organization must minimize the risk that the merger will decrease the perceived level of investment needed.
The need to minimize the risk of merging the organization highlights the biggest underlying challenge: the politics of technology budgeting and staffing.
Few organizations rank major investments in networking as strategic.
The existential risks associated with cybersecurity make investing in that arena highly strategic and highly visible.
To that end, the most direct way to address these challenges is to bring the new organization together under the CISO. Capitalize on the tenor of the times to spread some of cybersecurity's cachet over the network.
Make it clear that designing, building and managing a secure network is crucial to the effort of reducing cyber-risk overall.
Treat the network as a part of the cybersecurity architecture, and invest in it to make sure it is a supremely capable part.
With nearly two decades of technology experience, he has worked at all levels of IT, including end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database specialist, network administrator, network architect and systems architect.
His focus areas include AI, cloud, networking, infrastructure, automation and cybersecurity.
This Cyber News was published on www.techtarget.com. Publication date: Wed, 29 May 2024 20:43:34 +0000