Every single day, business assets and data face various security threats. Ranging from natural calamities to personal interference, these threats must be detected early enough and dealt with urgently in order to safeguard the interests of the business and its employees. Therefore, you should put together a competent team of threat assessors to identify any possible threats and propose practical solutions of countering them.
Come up with a functional structure
The work of such a team is to identify the most dangerous threats which the business is prone to by going through tonnes of data and information presented to them. Top on the agenda of such a team is coming up with solutions and prioritizing them in order of urgency. It requires one to understand the business in question and the industry or market as a whole.
In order to get experts with the relevant qualifications, you need to first define the roles in the team. Elaborately expound on the activities of each member in their specific capacity. This means establishing a functional structure for the team, and laying out the procedures and processes to be used for its operations.
Ensure that the team fits properly into the entire business structure. This is to mean that there are clear reporting systems and monitoring tools that will keep their operations in check within the organization. They should also be in a position of leverage when it comes to gathering the relevant information that they need to undertake their operations. Once you have clearly indicated all these, you can go ahead and look for the experts.
Pursue relevant qualifications
Identifying the individuals who will fit in the team and deliver as expected can be quite challenge. However, you need to make sane decisions as this will determine how safe your business is from both internal and external threats.
It is wise that the team leader is a security consultant from a security company in Montreal. He should have reasonable experience and expertise in coming up with and installing the best security systems. This way, he is able to analyse the existing system and come up with a better one that has more efficient security features.
Needless to say, there needs to be several employees from the business in the team. The advantage of having them there is that they have deeper knowledge of the business operations and activities. They also understand the state of affairs regarding interactions within and without the business, and they are able to outline the security history; previous threats and how they were dealt with, and the measures that were put in place to prevent similar occurrences.
Ensure that you have individuals with varied expertise as they will all bring something different to the table. Security professionals, business analysts, network and physical engineers as well as programmers all have unique skills that can be useful. This broad range of backgrounds and specialties will bring both technical and operational skills which will enhance the team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Above all, they should possess a great deal of creativity and attention to detail.
Have a well thought-out plan
Now that you have a competent and capable team, you need to have an elaborate plan of how the assessment should be done. First, an analysis of the existing systems should be done in order to identify their ability to safeguard the business and its employees from possible threats. For this to be successful, a detailed security history should be provided as well as high level information regarding threats that caused damage and how they were neutralized.
Afterwards, all the gaps and vulnerabilities should be identified so as to find innovative solutions for them. It is at this point that any developments in the market should be discussed and possible future threats be enumerated. The team should look into creative ways of keeping the security systems up to date with emerging threat in order to effectively counter them.
A change of systems involves transitioning from the current products and suppliers to more technologically advanced ones. There should be proper communication structure to inform all the relevant parties of the implementation of the proposed solution. This will reduce confusion among the members of staff thus making it easier for them to accept the new changes.
For the team’s work to be efficient, they should come up with a strategic post-implementation plan to evaluate and monitor the new system. Evaluation will ensure that it is working as expected, and monitoring will maintain it at functional levels by adhering to the set procedures and standards. A thorough evaluation will also include regular analyses of emerging threats, and the ability of the system to successfully prevent damage to the business due to those threats.
At the end of the day, the threat assessment team exists to provide an elaborate security strategy in order to tackle the most critical threats to the business.
