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## Implementing security best practices 

Knowing your current state helps you on your way to building a comprehensive strategy. Then, you ensure that best practices are followed. 

To help reach your goals, check out these tips: 

✓ In a highly distributed environment, manage the identity of who’s allowed to access what resources under what circumstances. Clearly defined rules combined with automation provide a path forward. 

✓ Try to create general awareness of security risks by educating and warning staff members about specific dangers. Complacency is easy, especially if you’re using a cloud service provider. However, security threats come from employees as well as outside organizations. 

✓ Regularly have external IT security consultants check your company’s IT security policy, IT network, and the policies and practices of all your cloud service providers. 

✓ Determine specific IT security policies for change management and patch management, and make sure that policies are well understood by your service management staff and by your cloud service provider. 

✓ Review backup and disaster-recovery systems in light of IT security. Apart from anything else, IT security breaches can require complete application recovery. 

Security risks, threats, and breaches can come in many forms and from many places, so companies need to establish a comprehensive approach to security management across IT and the business. As your IT environment moves beyond the internal data center to include public and private cloud services, security, governance, and reliability has to be handled in a cohesive manner based on a coordinated plan. 

