Mobility and Social Media Trends: Instilling Risk Awareness

Instilling risk awareness

Encourage your enterprise to develop a collective understanding of the nature of informational and reputational risk -- and gain employee support to help identify, manage and control that risk. Provide awareness training for staff at all levels about the overall risks of networking and mobility. Those employees working in areas of particular vulnerability, whether to information assets or corporate reputation, need especially focused training.

It is also important to set the right tone -- from the top. As CIO, you -- along with other key members of your company's senior management team -- should champion mobility and networking. Serving as a role model, your daily routine should provide guidance as to appropriate mobile and networking behavior.

A mobile, socially networked workplace offers profound advantages, as well as an array of new and fast-evolving risks. The answer is to embrace these ever-evolving technological advances in a way that leverages the business advantages to your organization. But at the same time, implementation of the appropriate information security policies, tools, and training will be critical.

With a 100% secure environment a thing of the past, companies that blend the latest security and privacy controls with a culture of risk awareness have the best chance of success in finding a middle ground that balances the risks and rewards.

Jose Granado is a Principal and the America's Practice Leader for Information Security Services within Ernst & Young. George "Chip" Tsantes is a Principal at Ernst & Young LLP's Financial Services Office within the Information Technology Advisory Services group. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP.