There’s no denying that today’s digital ecosystem must be protected. But preventing increasingly frequent and severe attacks, which often target customer data and confidential information, requires more out of your organization’s security policies. Add in the challenge of organizations being asked to develop, deliver, and deploy software faster than ever before, many are finding that their application security (AppSec) policies are insufficient—resulting in costly vulnerability triage and application deployment delays. Recent research found that 70 percent of data breaches are directly linked to vulnerable applications and 60 percent of organizations have experienced a data breach at some point in the last three years. This highlights the critical need for formal, organization-wide security policies, in addition to AppSec policies that directly influence software developers and application security teams, who must still operate at the speed that modern DevOps requires. Before discussing AppSec policies, let’s look at the common security policies found in most organizations today.
Common Security Policies
- Regulatory: Ensures that organizations strictly follow standards and regulations that they are required to adhere to, primarily due to their lines of business.
- Advisory: Instructs employees of an organization about which activities and behaviors are allowed or prohibited within the organization.
- Informative: Aims to inform employees about risks, threats, attacks, what to look out for, and how to possibly react to a situation.
- Organizational: Operates as the outline of the organization’s security program and how they implement their security procedures and guidelines for computer systems, etc.
- System-Specific Policy: Covers particular computer systems, for example, what hardware and software are approved for usage in a specific computer system.
- Issue-Specific Policy: Addresses specific functional and operational aspects of an organization that needs more focused attention.
Issue-Specific Policies
When looking closer into an organization’s issue-specific policies, they can cover many areas of security within the IT environment as follows:- Change Management Policy
- Physical Security Policy
- Email Policy
- Encryption Policy
- Vulnerability Management Policy
- AppSec Policy
- Media Disposal Policy
- Data Retention Policy
- Acceptable Use Policy
- Access Control Policy