It just came up recently while discussing with one of my friend, the need for capturing service assets as a part of asset inventory which will be used further for risk assessment exercise.
In a normal scenario, everyone uses a template that captures assests under different cateogories, viz
- Information Asset – deals with electronic and paper based data
- Hardware Asset – includes all your hardware, cupboards, safe, etc
- Software Asset – includes all software’s used or implemented in the organization.
- Service Asset – services that a department avails from the organization
- People Asset – talks about people / employees
Now the discussion went like this:
Discussing with various personnel it is quite amazing to see each one come up with their own way of interpreting controls and to what depth each control need to be implemented. I would like to illustrate a discussion that I had recently. The standard too does not talk about this and it is left to the person who implements and to the auditor on how they want to look at the implementation effectiveness.
Up until now some of the aspects that we look into while implementing a control is as mentioned below;
- Is the control implementation cost less than or equal to loss of the damage a threat could cause to an organization?
- Does the control implementation enable process improvements?
- Is the control implementation required as a part of legal, regulator or contractual requirements?
The very first lesson taught to me in my computer classes where “A computer is as smart as you are” and this statement holds good even today. For the computer would do only that a person would want it to do. The only advantage a computer has over human is that of speed and storage capacity.
While looking at various aspects of data loss, the end reason always point to “PEOPLE”. The above statement holds good not only because there are data loss (which is now the high rated security risks), even if you look at any frauds that has happened in the recent past, everything has been manipulated by “HUMAN”. No matters what standards are adopted, what stringent rules are set in an organization, frauds still happen.
