Policy Development

Good controls are worthless without good policy to go alongside it.

Technology cannot solve all your problems.

Security policies play an essential role in protecting the information, assets and people in an organization. They are essential for protecting the organization itself, as they communicate the standards for expected behavior to everyone who works within the organization, be it an employee, manager, system administrator, vendor or related third party. Security policies establish and communicate means by which compliance with the policy will be monitored, and will define the consequences for failure to comply with the policy.

Effective security policies help an organization accomplish one of the most difficult objectives that it faces. That objective is taking the task of securing the organization’s information and assets from something that is just a spoken ideal and making it something that every user in the organization understands its importance of and becomes an active participant in the program.

Effective policy communicates management intent and organizational consensus.

We often think that users will do the right thing, and that the right thing should be obvious. We find in practice that users will do what we expect of them, but only after those expectations have been communicated to them and they have been trained on how to meet them.

Security policies can be an effective tool in strengthening the core business of an organization. For many organizations, however writing policy is a task that is seen as very difficult or should be done by an outside consultant who is a subject matter expert. In fact, the reverse of this is true. There is no better group to form a policy than those who are going to be governed by it. And most of the time, your team already has an adequate knowledgebase - they just need someone to help document that knowledge.

Net Reaction helps organizations with collaborative, facilitated policy development. Our experts will work alongside your team to identify stakeholders, understand management intent, interview people with knowledge about your processes, and create policy statements. The resulting policy statements are clear, they can be understood by your users, and can be maintained by your team.

Whether it’s one policy or a whole policy framework – let Net Reaction with your next policy project.