Integrating Security into Projects: Best Practices

Today, cybercrime is a very real threat for all French businesses, regardless of their size and sector of activity. Destruction or theft of data, sabotage or economic and industrial espionage, cyberattacks often have disastrous consequences for businesses (stopping production, loss of turnover, damage to brand image, etc.) and can damage their sustainability.

Cybercriminals are showing ever more skill, cunning and malice to infiltrate your systems with malware or ransomware and thus steal your confidential data.

Unfortunately, in project management, computer security is not always a priority. To fight against the scourge of cybercrime, project managers must be careful, anticipate IT risks as well as more traditional risks and integrate security into their projects. Addressing a security problem will cost you more than preventing it beforehand. As the saying goes: “Prevention is better than cure.”

4 tips for integrating IT security into the heart of your projects

1. Implement IT risk management

Today, IT risk management has become essential. It allows the analysis of the various threats related to cybercrime that you and your team may face, as well as the vulnerabilities of the project and the risks that result from them. All this in order to prevent them or, if necessary, to treat them effectively.

At the start of each project, the project manager and his team should meet during a brainstorming session in order to identify all possible risks.

Remember to ask computer technicians to help you because they know and master computer systems and their weaknesses.

Here are the different steps in setting up a risk management (computer and more traditional):

• Identify and identify all possible dangers.
• Evaluate risks by level of importance and rank them from the most dangerous to the least dangerous.
• Estimate the probability of these risks occurring.
• Determine what their impact would be if they happened (financial, legal, corporate image, business slowdown, data confidentiality, etc.).
• For each of the risks identified, find an appropriate solution to prevent them or establish an action plan to be implemented to treat them and limit their effects.
• Estimate the budget needed for each proposed action.
• Define indicators to monitor and control the evolution of risks as well as the actions implemented to prevent these risks.

2. Define best practices

To encourage your employees to adopt responsible behavior, write a cybersecurity charter and draw up a list of best practices to follow. Also check the practices applied by your service providers and suppliers.

Examples of best practices that are free and easy to implement:

• Create passwords that are hard to find. Never use the same password several times and change them regularly (ideally every three months).
• Do not share your usernames and passwords.
• Regularly update your software officially because they fix flaws and anomalies that can be used by hackers to access your system.
• Don't open emails from strangers and never click on an attachment or link from an unknown sender.
• Secure your mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, and laptops).

Careful monitoring of your computer system should also be part of the best practices to adopt. This is the best way to quickly detect anomalies and malfunctions and thus to react quickly and appropriately.

Finally, remember to regularly update your charter according to new threats encountered.

3. Ensure compliance with best practices

Congratulations, you now have your cybersecurity charter and list of best practices. Now, it is necessary for your employees to know their existence and to implement them.

To do this, make your employees aware of the dangers of cybercrime, the different forms of computer attacks that exist as well as the behaviors they should ban and what to adopt to avoid problems.

Conduct regular training sessions for all staff during which you present your IT security charter and best practices. At least once a year, remind all of your employees, and don't forget to raise awareness among each newcomer. Finally, do regular audits to verify that these practices are respected because 90% of data breaches are due to human error. (Techradar)

4. Adopt secure tools

Carefully choose the tools, platforms, and other software you use. Opt for secure software that prioritizes the protection of your data.

For example, trust Wimi Armoured, a highly secure project management software which guarantees the security, confidentiality and sovereignty of your data, in particular thanks to end-to-end encryption and the hosting of your data on French territory. All while offering essential features for effective collaboration.

Conclusion

IT security depends on everyone's responsibility, not just the IT department. The impact of a cyberattack can have serious consequences on the realization of your projects as well as on the sustainability of your business.

Computer security must be part of your daily life and good practices must become reflexes. Finally, remember to check that you are well covered by your insurance in case of problems related to computer security