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Don’t Overlook IT Risk Compliance When Defending Against Cyberattacks

Posted in: Blogs, compliance, compliance audit, compliance risks, risk and compliance, Security - Sep 22, 2021

With cyberattacks surging in recent months, company leaders from the C-suite to the boardroom are urgently asking: How can we best defend ourselves?

While it may not be the first thing that comes to mind, an essential piece of any effective cybersecurity strategy must be IT risk compliance. In fact, compliance and security should be viewed as one and the same — a fully integrated facet of your business operations.

For some, compliance is treated as a nuisance, or just another box to check. However, this somewhat complacent approach is exactly what can leave the door open for today’s sophisticated and aggressive hackers.

And as the government begins working more closely with businesses to regulate and strengthen security — take, for example, the new Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative — reaching and maintaining compliance is more important than ever to protect your organization and mitigate risk.

Build an Integrated Compliance and Security Program

In order for companies to truly reduce risk, they need to have a security and compliance program that operates as one. This means breaking down silos and communication barriers, as well as integrating processes to ensure no risk falls through the cracks.

Because the truth is, “passing” a compliance audit does not provide absolute assurance a company has strong security controls, and having security controls in place does not mean they are operating effectively.

Having security controls in place does not mean they are operating effectively.

Instead, when compliance and security teams work together, IT risk compliance should be a natural outcome of information security best practices.

In practice, a truly integrated approach starts with an internal risk assessment to understand your vulnerabilities across the enterprise. Once this is completed, your security team can put in place controls — such as multi-factor authentication, risk-based access controls, and encryption — to protect information assets.

Then your compliance team can validate that those controls are functioning as planned and satisfy regulatory and industry frameworks. This process repeats as continuous risk monitoring continues to expose new and emerging risks.

In effect, the alliance between security and compliance ensures that controls are working. In the event of an attack, the company can have full confidence in the resolution and mitigation of risk.

Read more: Why Is Risk Management Important?

Establish Automated Processes for Better Collaboration

To enable better collaboration across security and compliance teams, automated workflows are a must. Implementing modern cybersecurity measures and assessing the compliance of those measures across a complex set of frameworks can be a time-consuming, manual process.

Many teams are still managing IT and information security compliance with manual processes and spreadsheets.

Yet many teams are still managing IT and information security compliance with manual processes and spreadsheets, leaving themselves vulnerable to errors, gaps, and risks. For these teams, automation can be a gamechanger. Automation enables true interoperability, improves lines of communication, and empowers teams to work together more seamlessly across first, second, and third lines.

Automation can be especially powerful for smaller teams, as it frees up time and resources to solve important business problems, better forecast risk, and decrease risk profile — the things that truly promote security.

Create a Culture That Prioritizes Compliance

Risk is never truly isolated. If a compliance or security vulnerability is exploited, it affects your entire organization. That’s why it’s so important to create an organization-wide culture of compliance — from the board and the C-suite to internal auditors and security professionals.

When compliance comes from within an organization, rather than being imposed on employees, it becomes more than following the rules and doing the same old thing. It’s truly a part of the fabric of your culture, with each employee participating in protecting the company from cyber incidents.

As a business leader, it’s your job to create and foster this culture at every level, educating employees about the importance of risk and compliance. You must provide them with a practical framework to identify, manage, and remediate risks.

At the end of the day, cyberattacks are going to happen. It’s up to your company to have a strong, integrated compliance and security program in place, so when attacks do occur, it’s in your power to minimize their harm.

The post Don’t Overlook IT Risk Compliance When Defending Against Cyberattacks appeared first on CIO Insight.

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CX and UX: Similar, but Definitely Different

Posted in: Innovation - Sep 22, 2021

Ask the average person if the customer experience and user experience are the same, and you will likely get either a tacit agreement or a confused shrug. This confusion can be directly linked to a common misconception that the two are essentially the same.

When you look under the hood of both customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX), then it’s crystal clear that they are similar, but different. Not only in what they are designed to do, but also how they behave as a business optimization strategy for end-user engagement.

To put it bluntly, companies aiming to deliver great products must understand both journeys to succeed.

UX Is How We Interact

According to ISO 9241-210, UX can be defined as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, service, or product.” To put it into plain English, UX is how the end user interacts with the company, its services, and its products in a single channel — be that digital, print, or traditional media.

A great experience meets the customer’s exact needs with simplicity and elegance, giving the customer a feeling of satisfaction. On the flip side, this hides the requirement to understand what makes that experience great. And while the user interface (UI) is an integral part of the design, the UX is different from the UI.

A great experience meets the customer’s exact needs with simplicity and elegance.

Nielsen Norman Group (NN/G) explains this difference with an example of a movie review website. That website will have reviews, some good and some bad. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be inadequate for people who want information about a minor independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from major studios.

To make things slightly more complicated, UX is often confused with usability. This popular misconception just muddies the waters. In fact, NN/G defines usability as a quality attribute of the UI, highlighting whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth. With usability in the mix, total user experience becomes an even broader concept.

CX Is Where We Interact

So, if UX is about perceptions and emotions, then what is CX? The simple answer: CX is an umbrella concept that includes all the channels and products where a customer interacts with the brand, as well as how the customer feels about the brand.

For the most part, this is related to the cognitive, effective, sensory, and behavioral responses that occur along the various touchpoints in the product lifecycle. Companies usually measure these responses during what is known as the consumption process — the pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages, for instance.

CX is related to the cognitive, effective, sensory, and behavioral responses that occur in the product lifecycle.

All of these stages are directly linked to the cumulative impact on the customer over the course of these defined and multiple touchpoints.

For that reason alone, an organization seeking to optimize the users’ experience with their brands must focus on the CX design as a primary goal. The end-user experience typically is a journey with many touchpoints, so a good CX design team considers, assesses, and optimizes all those engagement opportunities.

CX refers to how users perceive a product, system, or service. From a company perspective, these can be slotted into customer service, advertising, brand reputation, sales process, pricing, and product delivery. That means there are defined goals to hit, mainly to dovetail business strategies with the actual customer’s overall experience — while always keeping the customer’s overall happiness in mind.

Critical Concepts, Different Outcomes

Although the terms “customer experience” and “user experience” have vastly different outcomes in terms of how the customer perceives and uses the product, there are multiple levels of engagement and customer interaction. Each of these is equally critical for the overall experience.

For instance, NN/G thinks about CX across three distinct levels: single interaction, journey, and relationship.

Interactions between a person and a brand can occur over a period of years (which, in some cases, might be a lifetime). So it becomes clear that you need to look at all aspects of that experience and how it impacts a person’s decision making. In today’s connected society, those interactions are considered to be primarily digital.

We should never forget that the bricks-and-mortar experience may have a direct impact on the virtual.

The single interaction level reflects the experience the person has using a single device to perform a specific task. This level is the one most commonly identified as the actual user experience and is not limited to digital interactions. Granted, most UX and CX is digital, but we should never forget that the bricks-and-mortar experience may have a direct impact on the virtual.

The journey level captures the person’s experience as they work to accomplish a goal (possibly using multiple interaction channels or devices to do so). In the vast majority of cases, this level is the end-to-end process of a customer completing their goal. In today’s connected society, this is the nirvana of omnichannel engagement.

The caveat is that delivering a first-rate journey-level experience is often tricky for companies, mainly because it requires significant effort to both integrate the various channels and coordinate different elements for interaction-level design.

Companies might experience a few unseen challenges, which include but are not limited to consistent messaging, omnichannel expectations, brand continuity, and the integration of a back end that can allow customers to move effectively between channels.

The relationship level refers to all the interactions between the person and the company throughout (no surprises here) the life of the customer relationship. Essentially, this is the complete customer experience level. At this point, brands focus on the customer’s actual (and potential) lifetime experience with the brand instead of a single interaction or a journey.

Read more: Hiring Crunch Hits IT

Improving the Experience by Working Together

As the goal of both is customer satisfaction, CX and UX must work together to deliver the best possible experience to the customer.

Companies will benefit when they understand how vital the relationship between CX and UX is to their overall success. Customers tend to pay more when they have a good relationship with a company with an amazing product. A recent Forrester report cites the fact that people are willing to pay up to 4.5 times more for a great customer experience than an average one.

People are willing to pay up to 4.5 times more for a great customer experience than an average one.

A good UX should improve overall CX. Aggregating customer feedback, for instance, can be leveraged to improve on the UX, since the brands can quickly improve product and customer experience based on the input from end users.

This becomes even more important when you consider that an experience might begin online and migrate to a physical engagement.

Why UX and CX Matter

With customer and user experience so important to brand reputation and customer loyalty, companies that fail to deliver either one, the other, or (in some cases) both, will experience pain points and a decline in their overall success.

A good CX enhances brand loyalty, but the UX must align with business optimization strategies. Importantly, the latter must deliver the subjective interactions that will influence the entire journey, and not just a single point in time.

And while CX is an umbrella under which companies can add both UX and UI, it is critical to understand that all three are equally crucial to the overall success of a product, system, or service. A happy user is a happy customer, and that is an emotional state that can be directly linked back to effective CX and UX.

Read next: AI Software Trends for 2021

The post CX and UX: Similar, but Definitely Different appeared first on CIO Insight.

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Unified Platforms for Modern Analytics – Results of New TDWI Best Practices Research

Posted in: Business Intelligence - Sep 22, 2021

Join TDWI Research VP Fern Halper as she discusses the results of her most recent Best Practices Report on the unified platform for modern analytics.top

The Information Gap: Driving Cultural Alignment in Analytics

Posted in: Business Intelligence - Sep 21, 2021

During this presentation, we will review the common causes of the information gap as companies undertake a data and analytics initiative and how the information gap impacts analytics efforts. We'll also explore the key pillars for building a culture of analytics and technology and organizational best practices for building a culture for analytics.top

Data Collection Ethics: Big Tech and Privacy

Posted in: Big Data, consumer privacy, data collection, data collection and management, digital privacy, user data collection - Sep 17, 2021

What is the responsibility of large companies dealing with private data? Large organizations like Google and Facebook hold a plurality of the world’s personal data, and the federal government is looking to crack down on Big Tech. But what does this mean for other businesses’ data collection?

Public Good vs Personal Privacy

Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, big data policies have come under scrutiny. Rina Shainski, chairwoman and co-founder of Duality Technologies, told TechRepublic that more privacy regulations would lead to a more heterogeneous privacy landscape, but this could challenge the global data economy — especially for multinational organizations.

When the pandemic began, very few thought this would be a watershed moment for data privacy. However, “The salience of such conflicts has grown apparent in the context of the global pandemic, with inter-organizational data collaboration increasingly necessary for researching COVID-19,” Shainski said.

Corporations and individuals began to see both the ramifications and benefits of sharing sensitive data between different companies. A larger question formed about how best to use personal data.

Remote Work Fuels Data Leaks

When more companies adopted a remote work model, significant security gaps opened up. “Between February 2020 and May 2020, more than half a million people were affected by breaches in which the personal data of video conferencing services users (e.g., name, passwords, email addresses) was stolen and sold on the dark web,” according to a Deloitte report.

47% of employees cited distraction as the top reason for falling for a phishing scam.

Further, a spike in cyberattacks resulted when at-home employees stopped following best practices to protect company data. According to a Tessian survey, “47% of employees cited distraction as the top reason for falling for a phishing scam,” and 57% of survey respondents said they “feel more distracted when working from home.”

Big Tech Takes the Lead — for Now

The most public-facing data collectors are the easiest targets for individuals, governments, and other businesses to blame when data breaches occur. However, some tech giants have taken the lead to help protect individual and company data from being hacked.

During the pandemic, Google began to adopt changes to phase out existing ad-tracking technology from Chrome Browsers. And Apple caused major panic when it rolled out changes to its ad policy, though big advertisers like Facebook and Snap don’t seem to be too badly affected yet.

It’s clear that the biggest data collectors are attempting to anticipate and sidestep future regulations by ramping up privacy education for users. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all dedicate space on their sites to providing advice on how users can protect their private information. Critics say this shifts the onus for data privacy onto users without addressing systemic vulnerabilities.

Still, other companies can take a cue from Big Tech and educate workers — especially remote workers — on the importance of data security and vigilance. But ultimately, the key to ethical data collection is making sure that data isn’t accessible to bad actors.

The post Data Collection Ethics: Big Tech and Privacy appeared first on CIO Insight.

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