In today’s continuously changing environment, it’s not enough to have excellent IT solutions. You also need robust security to ensure everything goes according to plan. It’s even more important to put these solutions in place beforehand, as streamlining IT operations as a whole will only become more complex as technology develops and security threats become more unique, unpredictable, and complicated. Despite this need, 54 percent of companies still only use a security operations (SecOps) team to consult a few projects—if any at all. In fact, 72 percent indicate that they believe SecOps have only become more challenging over the last couple of years.
ServiceNow Security Operations empower you and your IT team to accomplish your tech performance without compromising on your security. Uniting IT operations and IT security under a single structured workflow prevents roadblocks and enables you to resolve threats proactively. Let’s explore what SecOps involves in greater detail to learn why all organizations need it and what to look for in any security solution you invest in.
ServiceNow SecOps: The Key to Developing Actionable Intelligence
SecOps as a whole grew out of the Development Operations (DevOps) methodology. The model focuses on aligning teams and departments, allowing them to streamline processes and communication. The success of DevOps inspired the development of SecOps, a security methodology seeking to combine security and operations to ultimately provide a safe IT environment for all processes, including DevOps, to accomplish organizational goals.
Although it continues to evolve, SecOps seeks to provide threat management that allows companies to monitor networks, respond to incidents, and use automation to predict attacks. SecOps focuses on small segments of programs rather than entire suites, allowing teams to productively address risks to develop a safer ecosystem.
More specifically, SecOps ensures that you have the actionable intelligence needed to stop attacks in their tracks and proactively identify potential holes in your security operations. For example, harvesting relevant data helps you identify false positives, prioritize incident alerts based on risk, and compare risks across internal and external sources. Most importantly, it ensures that you can efficiently and accurately analyze incidents to improve your entire processes.
A Definition of Strategic Portfolio Management
Before we dive into how to use SPM, let’s establish what it is. Formerly known as IT Business Management, SPM focuses on selecting and prioritizing projects that will best enable you and your team to achieve a defined set of goals. This means anticipating critical business requirements, allocating resources, and evaluating the value of your project portfolio. It also means adapting rapidly to change so you can consistently deliver more value.
Here are just a few of the tasks you can manage through ServiceNow SPM:
- Organizational alignment with business priorities
- Enterprise scaling
- Synchronizing epics across platforms
- Project management through an interactive project workspace
- Resource management
- Enhanced visibility across all projects
At the end of the day, SPM is about making sure your actions are supporting your business goals. Because what’s the point of investing time and money in your processes without ensuring they’re effective?
Prioritize Visibility into Processes
The most important way to ensure you take full advantage of SPM is to make sure that leaders have full visibility into all processes, goals, and features. First, you should proactively identify constraints in your enterprise. Knowing and hopefully removing these helps leaders identify risks more easily so they can allocate resources and responsibilities to those best qualified for each task. Without this visibility, it’s challenging—if not impossible—to determine the best steps, let alone drive the change you need to thrive and continuously achieve results.
ServiceNow’s dashboards give you visibility to develop a comprehensive roadmap and drive continuous improvement for years to come. By consistently prioritizing a full picture of what your team is accomplishing and what you’d like to achieve next, you can make sure nothing goes unnoticed.
Develop Adaptive, Change-Focused Culture
Visibility isn’t the end of the story, though. Your team must also be able to adapt anything that isn’t working to achieve your business goals. This means saying goodbye to rigid planning and adopting a flexible, adaptive, change-focused approach that allows leaders to allocate resources, roles, and responsibilities according to changing customer needs and market conditions.
But, it’s also important not to drive so much change that it becomes too much. Organizations must know how to handle change management effectively to avoid overwhelming their team. Here are a few tips to make sure you drive a positive, change-enabled culture at your organization.
Ask for Feedback
Communication between business leaders, managers, and end users is key to making sure you aren’t driving too much change at once. Ask for surveys, collect qualitative data, and host roundtable discussions regularly and encourage anyone and everyone to participate.
Establish a Roadmap for Change
When you identify a good opportunity for change, how will you ensure it happens efficiently and effectively? Be sure to define a process for how you will handle change management moving forward so that when the time arises, you’ll know what to do. Who will oversee next steps? How will you ensure executive support and approval?
Empower Your Workforce
Don’t forget about your people. What are you doing to ensure they have the support they need to handle change effectively? It’s up to you to provide the environment for success without overwhelming your team.
Remember, success is not defined by achieving your goals straightaway. It’s determined by a growth mindset that allows you to grow, treat mistakes as opportunities, and pivot as necessary. SPM from ServiceNow provides your team with the foundation to engage in these goals.
Focus on the Customer Experience
Last but certainly not least, SPM can help your organization ensure the customer experience is at the forefront of your strategies—so make sure to prioritize it. Without considering customer objectives, it’s easy to end up investing in initiatives that may lead to less ROI or revenue.
First, identify internal and external customers, their needs and wants, and which of these are most important to them. Then, use that information to compare your own initiatives with their demands. For example, you could include leaders from various functions of your organization to identify what they think are the most valuable ideas, then bring those to executives for them to make an unbiased decision that aligns strategic goals with action.
Excel with Support from ServiceNow Elite Partner, Crossfuze
Do you want complete access to a host of platform expertise? If you’re searching for a ServiceNow Partner that will help you drive digital transformation and achieve your goals, Crossfuze is a ServiceNow Elite Partner, making it a top 1 percent partner for delivering long-term, consistent success globally. Reach out to us at LetsTalk@crossfuze.com to learn more.
