Information Security Governance Risk and Compliance

The continuously increasing vulnerability of an Information Technology risk specifically Information Security governance risk and compliance has become the major attention in most global information security. Among the Information security risk areas, top priorities are business continuity, disaster recovery, cyber risks, cyber threats, data leakage, data loss prevention, information security transformation, and compliance monitoring.

The purpose of Information Security risk and compliance is to protect and preserve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Not limited to it, the entities can be held, as it may involve protecting and preserving the authenticity and reliability of the information.

Therefore, Information Security Risk is defined as a combination of two factors probability and consequences. Normally, it raises two questions:

- The probability that a specific information security event will surely occur in the future.

- Also, The consequences because of this event.

Information security risks often emerge as the prospective security threats are ascertained that could exploit vulnerabilities in an information asset and therefore can cause harm to any organization.

The concept of information governance (IG) is widely known and is gaining popularity. Broadly, practitioners in the field of enterprise information management seem to have embraced the value of Information Governance but only a few are doing anything about it. Whereas, when we talk about compliance, it means either a state of being following established guidelines, regulations, or legislation or the process of becoming so. The information governance compliance states the legal obligations and duties and the appraisal and valuation of risks, which go hand-in-hand.

The lack of good information governance compliance has brought us to an inflection point i.e. decision-makers must gain control of their information to enable innovation, profit, and growth and to continue down the current path of the information revolution and potentially lose to those, who governing the information much better.

Information governance and compliance guides how organizational information value can be maximized by efficient and ethical handling of its content by ensuring that information is

- Held securely and confidentially

- Obtained fairly and lawfully

- Stored securely, accurately, and reliably

- Used effectively and ethically

- Shared and disclosed appropriately and lawfully

- Disposed of per regulatory instructions

No matter what country you are in, you can be sure that there is some form of a regulatory requirement on keeping records that directs what organizational information must be kept and for how long. Information subject to these retention requirements should be treated with care, much like information subject to eDiscovery, due to potential penalties and fines for not following the laws. Data, if not managed and retained as per regulations can trigger government information requests. Such requests possibly can be quickly transformed into expensive legal proceedings or fines or both including jail time.

Information security and privacy issues are closely related to the Regulatory Compliance challenge, which any organization generally face. The important step for devising governance measures to comply with regulations is identifying what data is where and how it moves through the enterprise between applications, databases, and users.