Innovation Insight: 5 Ways to Build a Sustainable Security Management Culture

Has your organisation considered creating a sustainable plan to build resilience again cyber security? This is what members were asked by Doctor Peter Trim at the March Management Innovation forum. Participants included Lloyds Banking Group, Airbus and Morgan Sindall amongst others.

Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Advanced Management at Birkbeck and author of Cyber Security Culture, Doctor Trim gave a short presentation, outlining policies to improve organisational resilience against such attacks:

- A collectivist approach needs to be taken to cyber security. All employees spend large amounts of their working lives interacting with technologies. Hence, make sure your whole team is aware of the risks.

- Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives often prove a headache for companies. In a study of 13,500 android apps, only 0.8% used encrypted connections. Businesses need to consider if these really are safe places for employees to store sensitive information.

- Generation Y are willing to share all sorts of information on the web. With the popularity of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook amongst this generation, IT training should be embedded in any graduate programmes.

- Organisational learning is central to communicating strategy. Educate employees through competitions on your company’s Intranet. Similarly, encourage the IT team to host sessions on online banking and other domestic issues – this will help increase engagement and foster familiarity.

- Review your policy on international travel. Devices used in hostile, foreign countries are prone to attack. Likewise, IP laws may not be sufficient in different geographies. Consider equipping employees that travel frequently with clean devices upon entry and exit of new countries.

Respected leadership and management consultant, Professor Vlatka Hlupic, will be speaking at the next Management Innovation meeting on Wednesday 9 April. She will be giving an insight into how businesses can diagnose issues affecting engagement and performance. Please contact us for more information and to join.