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A Comprehensive Cyber Security Assessment (CCSA) studies the intersection between people, technology and (process) work, with the major aim to find areas where technology architecture and human requirements produce potential risks. The comprehensive cyber security assessment relies on the knowledge base and corporate wisdom of your employees and an understanding of how technological change will affect the relationship between your employees, your company policies, human resources, training, and security metrics.
The CCSA will predict the repercussions that the implementation of technology, the change in process, and increased operational requirements will have on your employees, management, and the company in general. These findings, along with distributed desktop exercises, will identify how your employees deal with and adapt to complex scenarios, and are necessary before technology is implemented, so that changes can be made to ensure the level of security required, is achieved through cooperative human factors, as well as technology to ensure success.
The advent of development tools like Agile, the reduction of business analysts in corporations, and a desire for rapid implementation has led to shortcuts in proven design process that include task analysis, guidelines, verification and validation studies, input from employees at all levels, identification/ implementation of training, and the interconnected effects on the rest of the organization. The oversimplification has led to reduced understanding of need for caution and the effect of cyber security attacks.
There is an enormous need for the CCSA to gather quantitative and qualitative data that will support in the development of a cyber security plan that will create technology implementations with an eye on potential threats based not only on infrastructure, but will consider expected process improvements, and the messaging required to be relatable to the employees… in other words, a mutually beneficial implementation.
Given the dynamics of system change in the era of rapidly changing technological possibilities, success will come to those who can predict the transformations, changing roles, and the kinds of adaptations employees will create to level-set the new technology and process improvements. The CCSA sitting on the S.M.A.R.T. Platform incorporates human factors that will helps developers, analysts, and management to anticipate these unseen situations. Once identified, corporate entrepreneurs have the ability to use these predictions early in their infrastructure design process to avoid the negative unintended side effects of technology change and process improvement.
The rate of change that creates technological possibilities demands a complex dynamic of people, process, and technology. Observing these dynamics allows for the incorporation of all three that will produce implementations where employees embrace the change and understand the benefits of the change to the company, their department, and themselves.
Identifying, understanding, and proactively addressing the unseen dynamics of people, process and technology sits at the intersection of traditional business and system analysts, developers, and process improvement departments. There needs to be an overlapping approach to human factors, technology, individual and department perspectives, company politics, company values, and the need for mutual benefit for cyber security transformation to take effect within an organization.
Recognizing that implementing new cyber security technology or process improvement has complexities and rarely produces a simple outcome because the change will transform how people do their job and therefore how they will adapt to that change. Understanding the adaptive response of people and organizations to new systems, will allow for the balancing of parallel processes that allow for the gradual acceptance of some, while allowing the immediate acceptance for others. This approach prevents the fear of change from causing employees to level-set to a lower level of security while trying to hold on to irrelevant perceived benefits of the current system.
Uncovering and anticipating the complex dynamic of people, process, and technology within your organization is the basic construct of the CCSA. Research has shown that by anticipating the scenarios and injects, it allows for the creation of multi-layered technology and processes combined with training and inspection that will ensure the infrastructure protection is achieved, the employees are engaged and fulfilled, in other words, a mutually beneficial outcome.
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