Information Systems Management Information Systems

Information Systems Management

Information Systems Management - Keeping Information Secure

The current business world is operating in a competitive frenzy characterizing global industries. Security issues have been put aside for new business strategies. This appears to be grave problem because various organizations and corporations are losing vast amounts of information. For example, employees are leaking critical plans of developing new products and services thus costing their companies millions of costs in terms of sales and R&D (James, 2008). Technological innovations are accelerating at a rapid speed fostering elastic and blurred security principles and boundaries, which were initially clear boundaries. For instance, employees are routinely accessing internal data and systems of their organizations through unprotected public platforms such as WiFi, checking company emails using personal or public devices and doing their office work on personal software and other devices. As much as all these may appear to be innocent acts, they present the potential of exposing businesses to serious attacks (Gibson, 2011).

In today's business world, information has become a grave trending asset and it is a valuable and rich target. Big data reveals that significant promises, companies are engaged in the collection of potentially toxic information; numbers of personal identification, critical intellectual property, details of credit cards and health information of customers held by companies. If such information is attacked, it has the potential cause heinous damage to the business and customers (Zhang & Galletta, 2006). In light of the aforementioned challenges, businesses are battling on striking a balance between risk and access. This is in harmony with the accelerating rate of technological advances based on risk-based approaches attuned to the necessities of the business. For years, companies have been making heavy investments in sophisticated security systems based on IT. Corporations have not been flexible in adapting to the dynamic business and technology trends. Significant technologies are undergoing intense transformations and advances have made the once secure systems to become insecure. This has transformed IT from a stable atmosphere to an increasingly volatile environment. These issues must be addressed before they generate unpredicted vulnerabilities, which are likely to lead to significant decrease in effectiveness of security systems in organizations (James, 2008).

Cloud computing is a trend in technology providing cost control and real agility business benefits. Nevertheless, services based on cloud computing are currently floating outside privacy and security standards, which is likely to be decades old thus failing to address concerns such as shared tenancy and virtualization (Gibson, 2011). Similarly, cloud computing comes with more challenges; providers of cloud services are likely to outsource third party experts and if such links are not secure, they have high chances of influencing the entire security level of cloud computing. In extreme occasions, other services provided by cloud, such as resource sharing and multi-tenancy have chances of introducing what is commonly known as class breaks if the mechanisms separating routing, memory and storage may fail. In the end, doors to data theft, invalidated assurance levels, and service disruptions may be opened for both the clients and the providers of cloud services (Gibson, 2011).