'United States of Security' - ISF Congress 2018

Last week, the IRM team mingled with 700 other cyber security professionals at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. This activity was part of the ISF’s 29th Annual World Congress. The ISF Congress is a great peer-to-peer environment for sharing strategies, hearing stories and identifying new trends. The event gives the cybersecurity industry opportunity to discuss and find solutions to ongoing challenges. IRM’s focus wasn’t gambling or the strip’s bright lights. Instead, we had a thirst and hunger for safeguarding our customers from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

Many of the keynote speakers throughout the event spoke about the current political backdrop.  We’re experiencing a time when ‘nation-state’ hackers are encouraged to target all manner of organisations and/or authorities, regardless of their size. We saw evidence of this in March 2018 when the US Computer Emergency Readiness team released a report detailing a range of Russian cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure sectors.

We did, however, notice a key take-away missing from the various ISF breakout sessions. Collaboration. Or more so, the lack of collaboration from organisations when it comes to delivering a united strategy, framework and methodology for governing cyber risk.

When working with various organisations, we witness a lack of ability and resource to manage transformation change. This is particularly noticeable when an organisation is trying to implement new initiatives across a whole business, without a unified view of the full landscape. For example, ISO27001 certification is harder to achieve when you don’t share relevant information across departments which would otherwise allow you to replicate certain policies with ease.

Connecting the Cyber Dots.

The complexity and level of change required is still underestimated and certainly can’t be scaled with manual processes; Excel or traditional GRC platforms. IRM’s SYNERGi GRC platform, on the other hand, is allowing organisations to connect the dots and deliver transformation change, so that organisations can deliver a united approach to risk and compliance management.

What use cases are there for SYNERGi? With a range of modules (Governance, Risk , Compliance, Vendor, IT Security and Audit Management), the software platform can support many different compliance requirements including PCI, GDPR and NISD. With pre-loaded and customisable policy framework libraries, SYNERGi can be used for any type of legal and regulatory obligation.