Information security controls cover a wide range of measures designed to protect information systems and ensure data security. With their help, organizations can address potential vulnerabilities and establish robust defenses against cyber attacks.
Such controls can be considered the foundation of cybersecurity and risk management as they help block threats and minimize risks. They can take the form of policies, techniques, solutions, technologies, or actions that safeguard an organization’s information from breaches or compromise.
Table of Contents
- What Are the Three Major Types of Information Security Controls?
- Why Should Organizations Enforce Information Security Controls?
- What Assets Require Information Security Controls?
- How Can Organizations Identify the Information Security Controls They Need to Implement?
Information Security Controls: A Deep Dive
What Are the Three Major Types of Information Security Controls?
Information security controls can be broadly categorized into preventive, detective, and corrective controls.
Preventive
Preventive controls, as the name suggests, are put in place to safeguard against cyber attacks. An example would be implementing external attack surface management (EASM) to obtain an extensive view of an organization’s assets and their corresponding vulnerabilities. Digital assets that can’t be seen cannot be protected. Organizations need a means to gauge how large their attack surface is, and an EASM platform can help them do that automatically.
Detective
Detective controls, on the other hand, are designed to recognize attacks as they occur and send alerts to the teams tasked to handle them. Network security alerting systems are a great example of such as they issue warnings when attackers trip an organization’s perimeter defenses.
Corrective
Finally, corrective controls enter the picture after an attack occurs. They comprise post-incident responses and measures to improve existing solutions, policies, and procedures that will prevent similar issues to ensue in the future.
Why Should Organizations Enforce Information Security Controls?
No organization can survive without data. In fact, 64% of organizations manage at least 1 petabyte of data, and 41% of them surpass that with at least 500 petabytes of data. But gathering and storing information, especially that belonging to third parties (e.g., customers, service users, etc.), requires adhering to data protection regulations.
On top of that, all organizations are mandated to protect the information they collect and store. That’s why they implement information security controls, which allows them to:
- Protect against unauthorized access
- Comply with regulations and legal requirements (e.g., ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, HiTECH, NIST CSF, or CMMC)
- Safeguard intellectual property
- Preserve customer trust and loyalty
- Ensure business continuity and resilience
Enforcing information security controls ensures organizations meet the three pillars of information security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Data confidentiality requires restricting access to only authorized users. Ensuring data integrity, meanwhile, necessitates ensuring accuracy and completeness. Lastly, data availability means information users rely upon must be available at all times, regardless of where it’s being accessed from.
Given all that, experts expect the information security and risk management market to reach a market value of US$210 billion in 2024. And that spending is predicted to reach US$314 billion in 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.1% from 2023 to 2028.
What Assets Require Information Security Controls?
All of an organization’s assets, regardless of type, require information security controls. Those assets include physical (e.g., office building, data center, etc.) and digital (e.g., endpoints, applications, websites, domains, IP addresses, etc.) assets, cybersecurity solutions, and cloud services and applications.
They must protect against threats like software attacks enabled by malware infection, phishing, sabotage stemming from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, data theft, and extortion enabled by ransomware.
How Can Organizations Identify the Information Security Controls They Need to Implement?
To know what information security controls they need to employ, organizations must ask these questions:
- What are our high-value data and resources?
- What potential threats and vulnerabilities can compromise our data?
- What measures and mechanisms can reduce our information risks?
- Which of the controls we implemented work?
Key Takeaways
- Information security controls refer to measures designed to protect information systems and ensure data security.
- They come in three major forms—preventive, detective, and corrective.
- Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the pillars of information security.
- Physical and digital assets, cybersecurity solutions, and cloud services and applications all require information security controls.
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