Proactively managing risk and security

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have realized the importance of proactively managing risk and security to build resilience and to emerge from a crisis stronger. These best practices and tools can help you shift your risk management program into high gear.

Staying ahead of cybercriminals

Taking a progressive, visionary approach to risk and security—such as with ServiceNow workflows built on top of the Now Platform®—lets you direct resources where they deliver the greatest impact on your risk and security posture with the greatest efficiency.

For instance, most organizations are working to take advantage of MITRE ATT&CK® to operationalize their threat management and response practices. This framework for adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) offers deep insights into an attacker’s actions on each attack to help security analysts stay ahead of cyber criminals.

ServiceNow® Security Incident Response includes integrated threat intelligence tools and automated workflows to accelerate this plan. The MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base enables you to prioritize your security investments based on TTPs. After mapping a security incident to a MITRE tactic, security analysts use ServiceNow ATT&CK Navigator to create a roadmap for subsequent steps. A dashboard shows how your security approach fares against attacks.

Integrating security operations into workflows

The University of Southern California (USC), a research university with almost 80,000 people in its customer base, is mandated by the government to protect everything from student and personal information to research data.

When USC assessed its security posture, it found that almost 30% of its IT security efforts were related to phishing. Already using ServiceNow ITSM, USC integrated ServiceNow Security Operations into the Now Platform to improve insight into the university's security posture and processes.

Since the integration, USC has saved at least 40 hours a week, allowing the equivalent of one full-time employee's time each week to be redirected to other investigations.

Leveraging a common data model and platform

Bupa Australia and New Zealand, a global healthcare insurance provider that serves more than 32 million customers across 190 countries, also found great value in adding security operations workflows onto its ServiceNow implementation. When the organization wanted to improve visibility and control of its security practices, it chose the ServiceNow Vulnerability Response and Security Incident Response products.

“We already had a number of ServiceNow modules within our environment, namely ITSM and CMDB,” says Jonathan Milton, Bupa’s head of cybersecurity. “But when you get that integration, that’s where you get that exponential value.”

The value Bupa found was improved ability to protect not only customer data, but also service delivery, enabling its security and IT teams to address the right risks, in the right order.

Boosting operational resilience

Bolstering your security posture is only part of the equation. The other part is strengthening your business resilience as disruptions can impact your brand and reputation. ServiceNow has identified four pillars for achieving resilience:

• Technology and data

• Employees and customers

• Facilities and their safety and compliance

• Third parties

The Now Platform protects all four pillars.

Fast time to risk management value

When a healthcare organization that operates a dozen hospitals wanted to strengthen its risk management, it partnered with cybersecurity and risk management services organization Edgile. Edgile got ServiceNow Vendor Risk Management and Integrated Risk Management workflows up and running in only 12 weeks. The new solution dramatically improved quality consistency for the healthcare organization.

Learn more about how your organization can proactively manage risk and security in our Risk and Security Workflows Book of Knowledge.

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