Overview This case study provides a brief overview of the U.S. government legislation and policy environment as well as impacts on an organization. The essential legal policies for instituting an information security policy for any organization, regardless of tax status, such as commercial, non-profit entity or a federal agency and how those policies, both governmental and organizational, can impact an organization’s ability to ensure the integral information security triad of confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Current Legal and Policy Environment
A sound information security policy begins with an understanding of what is the current climate, which can consist of policies, regulations, and laws. It is imperative to understand what legislation your line of business must comply with as well any applicable governance requirements. Beginning with defining what is a policy, a guideline and a standard: a policy provides specific requirements or rules to abide by, which can be either at the governmental level, meaning a statute and/or organization-specific directive; also known as administrative law. According to the SANS Institute (n/d), a leading cooperative research and education organization, a standard can be an amalgam of requirements that is applicable to the user body; and a guideline can be considered akin to a recommendation for a best practice (SANS Institute, n/d). Current government policies can be issued by federal, state, local and/or tribal
The citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act is an important tool to protect and improve rivers, creeks, streams, and wetlands especially as state agencies may not have the resources to conduct regular water quality monitoring on every water body. Citizen involvement in monitoring and reporting pollution problems is key to watershed protection; hereby helping the government enforce the laws.
When a security policy is developed, it should be well defined and the information in it should be clear and plainly understand and the objectives should be well defined so that there will be no confusion. Conversely, a data system with security policies is probably going to have an assortment of countermeasures that address a range of threats. Policies, standards, guidelines, and coaching materials that are known to be obsolete and not enforced could be dangerous to a corporation due to the data being outdated. As a result, management is basically drawn into thinking that security policies do exist within the organization when actually that is not the case. Counter measures which are outdated does not do an organization any good because without the appropriate patches in place, the organization’s network could have holes which would leave them extremely vulnerable. All organizations need to be compelled to actively
internal and external users to whom access to the organization’s network, data or other sensitive
Due to policy changes, personnel changes, systems changes, and audits it is often necessary to review and revise information security policies. Information security professionals are responsible for ensuring that policies are in line with current industry standards.
The environmental protection agency has been stepping up its mandate of ensuring safer and better environment for not only the business operators, buts also the society as a whole. In order to achieve this goal of environmental protection, there has been the creation of environmental protection agency that has ensured that all the businesses, irrespective of their size and type, strive to ensure that the environment is protected for the benefit of current and future generations.
Another step involves security checks upon implementation and describes agency-level threat to the business scenario or the mission. It similarly entails sanctioning the information system for processing and lastly constant monitoring of the security controls. FISMA and NIST's standards are aimed at offering the ways for agencies to achieve their identified missions with safety commensurate with the threat (United States Department of Agriculture, 2015). Together with guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), FISMA and NIST create a framework for advancing and growing an information security scheme (SecureIT, 2008). Such framework includes control descriptions and evaluation, program development, and system certification and accreditation. The final objective involves conducting daily functioning of the agency and achieving the agency's articulated objectives with sufficient security commensurate with risk.
The purpose of this paper is to research and evaluate the legislative drivers for information security programs of State of Maryland in order to improve the information security policy to prevent loss of the confidentiality, integrity and availability of agency operations, organizational assets or individuals with new amendments in legislation. This paper elaborates the objectives of five proposals that would impact the information security policy of the State of Maryland upon becoming legislation.
This policy establishes the guidelines that the organization follows. This would include an acceptable use policy, an authentication policy, and an incident response policy (“The IT Security Policy Guide”, n.d., pg. 6). This policy will reflect the entire organizations security posture, not just the IT department ideas. A strong policy will help employees understand what is expected of them, and explain to customers how their information is protected.
The purpose of this paper is to review State of Maryland information security program documentation and to determine the security standards used to create the program in order to protect confidentiality, integrity and availability of agency operations, organizational assets or individuals which is the main agenda of State of Maryland Department of information technology. We will also discuss about other standards that can be useful for the State of Maryland Information technology and compare and contrast the standards.
Every organization must have adequate control mechanisms in place to help protect sensitive information from the distribution or transmission outside the organization, inappropriate disclosure, and control of how the information accessed is used. Companies should have policies in place that outline the course of action to take should inappropriate usage or disclosure of data be
These policies and procedures that accompany them must be regularly reviews and adjusted as the times and social standards change. Review must not only be made by IT management, but most importantly by senior level management. The senior level management will be required to uphold these policies and procedures and be ready to defend them from outside and inside forces. Change and adherence to policy are never easily implemented on the user and there will be pushback because of this. Management too will sometimes expect the policies and procedures not to apply to them as they are above this level of management. No so, because they are backed and enforced by the upper management themselves and not by the IT manager. There is more detail later in this paper.
in an effort to solve problems, which can be seen with the Clean Water Act.
Establishing an effective Information Technology Security Policy Framework is critical in the development of a comprehensive security program. The purpose of the Information Security Policy Framework is to insure your organization will be able to provide the minimum security level necessary to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information it collects and uses.
Designing a working plan for securing the organization s information assets begins by creating or validating an existing security blueprint for the implementation of needed security controls to protect the information assets. A framework is the outline from which a more detailed blueprint evolves. The blueprint is the basis for the design, selection, and implementation of all subsequent security policies, education and training programs, and technologies. The blueprint provides scaleable, upgradeable, and comprehensive security for the coming years. The blueprint is used to plan the tasks to be accomplished and the order in which
Security plays a major role in both the business and government worlds. We will discuss the legal aspects of organizational security management. Discuss both the positive and negative influences regarding organizational security. We will also be discussing what consequences will both business and government operations have to overcome if they fail to achieve security goals and objectives. The value private security management brings to businesses will also be discussed.