Explain the importance of information technology and systems in businesses today

Question

Explain the importance of information technology and systems in businesses today. Include at least one real world industry example where you believe information technology has changed the way that business is preformed in that industry. Next, identify the greatest potential threat to computer users when people and businesses send emails to communicate. Then, imagine that you are to educate a group of people on the threat you have identified. Explicate one way in which you would explain the threat and suggest one security control strategy to mitigate the threat in question.

Explanation / Answer

Let's start with Information Technology:

Information Technology can be considered as enabler of business functions which has benefits such as efficiency, capacity, speed, scalability and accuracy. Two benefits that a business can realize from adopting new technology is Production or Reduction. Whether it might be increased sales, better customer service, improved customer relationships, faster service, more efficient service, diversity. Now a days the formula for business success is "Drive innovation with InformationTechnology"

Lets take an example of Banking:

If you remember the way banking system was functioning 20 years back and how it has evolved, it is stunning.
There is high competetion in Banking Industry similar to any other industry such as Online Shopping.

Banking has evolved from a customer directly visiting to the bank to Online banking, later Mobile banking. It is more easier now, as we need not be in a line to do many of the bank transactions namely fund transfers and account balance checks. Information Technology has helped the Banking Domain to grow in all means at the same time carrying the level of risk involved in evolving from physical presence to the virtual world.

Now a days, Personal information is a highly sensitive data which is existing with banks as customer data. Protecting Customer data is very critical to a bank to maintain their reputation in the market. If bank fails to protect the customer data, reputation of that Bank goes down and customers would lose their faith in maitaining relationship with the bank. To ensure the customer data is secured in the Banking systems or network, a bank has to build up with set of Security measures both with respect to Physical as well the Network. Banks need to follow security policies alligned with Goverment as well as internal. This helps maitaining the customer data safe!

Lets take a simple example of a Threat:

Consider an employee in the bank got a phishing email in to his/ her mailbox and he/ she opened the email attachment, that can lead to a compromise/ infection of that machine. Once that machine is infected, there is a high possibility of tha machine infecting other machines in the network and entire network can get infected. The infection may lead the data to be exfilterated to the Hackers server.

In this scenario, we can educate users not to open any suspicious emails coming from unknown users and suggest them to reach out to local Security team which deals with Mail security to look at it. Who can then investigate more on the incident and apply a rule to filter out any message of that nature. Also we should conduct trainings about phishing mails or campaigns to all employees on regular periods. So that they can report phishing incidents to the appropriate team to act on them in timely fashion.


Security Control:

Maintain a Security Mail Gateway to filter suspicious and unwanted mail categories from reaching to emloyees mailbox. And a team to monitor those alerts and work on those cases immediately, simultaneously training employees about the frauds will also help!

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