It’s no surprise that data breaches are on the rise, but the biggest topic of conversation revolves around external threats creating these vicious attacks. What’s barely recognized is that many breaches actually originate internally through employees’ careless mistakes. Yikes!

Don’t let a Steve Urkel threaten your valuable information. When it comes to risk management, it’s important to develop a compelling vision that the whole organization can understand. Making it simple puts everyone on the same page, ensuring your strategic planning is secure and easy rather than a chaotic mess that goes up in flames.

According to Gartner, the typical objective for risk and security management is to create a holistic approach of planning, building, and running security solutions. These solutions should be aligned to business requirements so improvements can be made where needed.

Gartner states that the vision for risk and security management in the digital universe must:

Make the people, processes and technology more flexible.

Completely digitizing an organization doesn’t just affect IT; it affects the entire span of the organization. This puts a huge emphasis on the importance of applying resilience to people, processes and technology. This creates a huge focus on operational risk, making more and more business functions built for agility and convenience.

Increase awareness among employees to create trust.

Technology can certainly help you to protect valuable information, but employees are also capable of doing the opposite. It’s important to have increased personal awareness and responsibility with respect to safety and propriety. A great way to go about this is to create an ongoing awareness campaign rather than have training once a year.

Expect the unexpected.

In the digital world, each day is a little different than the next, which is a risk in itself. Having backup plans and creating a cloud strategy is the best way to plan for worst-case scenarios and be prepared for whatever is thrown your way.

Creating a vision balances the need to protect the enterprise with the need to adopt innovation, while informing employees about important security measures. For more information, read the Gartner report “Managing Risk and Security at the Speed of Digital Business” or download our CIO Challenge whitepaper below to learn real life examples of how CIOs are putting smart business processes to work!