High-Speed Assurance: Security as IT’s Essential Co-Driver

"Fast sharp right! Sharp right! Sharp right! Listen!
Medium right! You have to turn the wheel, Samir!
Samir! Double caution jump! Samir, you have to listen to my calls!
Samir you will break the car! We will not finish!"

Some days being in security can feel like being this co-driver.

In The Role of a Co-Driver in a Rally Car, Explained, Sebastian Toma explains how the co-driver or navigator is a critical part of effectively competing and racing. They do everything from recon to understand the route, to managing time and stages throughout the race, monitoring car performance, adjusting strategy, and managing documents.

Say your business is a race car at Rally Finland. Consider Information Technology (IT) the driver of your race car; they allow you to compete and enable you to get things done digitally. Without them you’re going nowhere fast.

Information Technology is driving your business; you use it every day to manage your business. It’s your email, your file storage, collaboration, and backups, the devices. Managing these tasks, helping employees get things done, and keeping the business running is what your IT team does. They’re called in when things break, ignored when things work, and are often overlooked and underappreciated. A good IT team is a business enabler. If you have good one, consider yourself lucky and show them some appreciation!

And a great IT team will set you up with fundamental security to protect against common problems: a strong password policy to protect against guessable passwords, good backups to restore data when a device is ransomed, and encrypted computers to scramble the data so your data stays safe from physical theft.

Your business is much more than technology, though. Your team and their interactions with clients, employees, and technology are critical components of how your business operates. As a rally car has a driver, a team, a mechanic, and a car, the co-driver helps them compete efficiently.

Like any good rally car driver knows, you need navigation guidance, monitoring, strategy adjustment, and excellent brakes so you can keep your speed up as long as possible, braking hard as late as possible. And you need to steer diligently to maintain that speed, choosing the correct lines around the track. Consider cybersecurity the expert co-driver and brakes to keep the business moving quickly and safely.

Most businesses that experienced a cybersecurity incident already had IT support and basic security measures in place. However, not many had security professionals with ethical hacking experience who were regularly assessing their systems for vulnerabilities and attack paths. They had drivers, but not co-drivers.

Consider the distinctions between IT and Cybersecurity by asking if your IT provider assists you in:

• Threat modeling your most critical assets and data?
• Identifying compliance exposure risks?
• Determining which services within your network are accessible via the internet?
• Ensuring the utilization of secure connection methods by vendors?
• Implementing secure default configurations in your systems?
• Modifying default passwords for enhanced security?
• Restricting and securing access to remote access services?

There is overlap in the services the two teams provide - particularly  when it comes to business continuity, incident response, policies, and training.

But when you want to go fast, efficiently: you need a co-driver.

I'll leave you with an example of some great drivers and co-driver action. Enjoy!