Growing Cybersecurity Budgets
Healthcare organizations are allocating more money and employees to IT security compared to a year ago. Despite these increases to IT security spending and staffing, budgets and staffing remain the biggest barriers to higher levels of confidence in security programs according to survey respondents in a study from HIMSS Analytics and Symantec. Sixty-five percent of healthcare organizations are still spending less than 6 percent of their IT budget on IT security.
Our View: Year after year, CISOs need to develop a comprehensive security budget that is able to mitigate against threats. This budget will have to be defended against many other stakeholders to ensure there is proper funding. Security budgets are unlike other departmental budgets and increases or decreases in the budget can drastically affect the organizational risk level. Our Security Budgeting Tool will allow you to streamline the creation of your security budget by mapping business capabilities to security controls, filling in a budget template, and communicating the value of security.
Business Architect Role
Developing the business architect role could have advantages (such as connecting IT to the business strategically) for several organizations. It is a job that requires solid business acumen and fluency in discussing everything from marketing and products to operations and M&A to HR and IT. To do the job right, the business architect would need the authority to block bad decisions that were not strategic and be allowed to drive decisions to acquire things in a timely manner, long before it was obvious to anyone else in the firm that they were needed.
Our View: The business architect plays a key role in structuring the enterprise in terms of its governance structure, business processes, and business information. This person aligns strategic goals and objectives with decisions regarding products and services, partners and suppliers, organization, capabilities, and key business and IT initiatives. A clear and complete job description is essential to confirming employee accountabilities, setting work direction, and creating a platform for future career progression. Use our Business Architect job description template to create your own job description for a business architect.
Capacity Strategy With Business Objectives
IT should manage data with business objectives to set requirements for data that meet service-level objectives and ensure that newly added resources are used most effectively. As the amount of data continues to grow at every organization, assigning objectives to data can allow data management software to automatically match data to a corresponding storage resource.
Our View: Start with monitoring data that is already gathered as part of normal routines. At many enterprises, there is a lack of understanding of the appropriate metrics to effectively manage capacity and there is a lack of analytical tools to start managing and planning capacity. Stop Just Managing Capacity by Moving to a Capacity-as-a-Service Strategy and create a service-oriented capacity management and planning strategy that will meet changing business needs.
The Lift: World’s Longest Cat
Stephanie Hirst owns a Maine coon cat (named Omar) that weighs an enormous 30.8 pounds and measures a whopping 3.93 feet long. Hirst submitted Omar to the Guinness Book of World Records and eagerly awaits to see if he will be named the world’s longest cat.