Stress is a common part of having a job in IT, but some stress can be good. It keeps you on your toes, looking for what might be an issue, and keeps you from being completely surprised by unexpected risks.
However, security stress can become paralyzing, and inhibit your ability to make decisions because you’re no longer in balance or control. While IT Security stress can seem overwhelming, we have a few tips that can make your burden a little easier to deal with. If you’re an administrator or product owner that uses Atlassian’s tools for teams, there are some easy things you can do to reduce stress that might otherwise cripple your ability to be productive.
If you’re already using Jira in your organization, double down. Use Jira to plan your Security projects. Life can be much easier to manage when all your tasks are in a backlog. Jira lets you build views and dashboards that can help keep you on track, without flooding you with unneeded detail.
Not every security risk is equal. Understanding what is a critical patch is versus a minor bug patch can help you prioritize maintenance. This is especially important at the enterprise level, where you may need to schedule maintenance outages far in advance. If you treat all patches with the same level of urgency, your apps will be taken out of service more frequently. This downtime can hinder your users and can even show up on your executive’s radar. Prioritizing how you address security patching can make you a more effective admin.
Sounds easy, right? By reducing the number of administrator accounts, you have fewer permission heavy users to worry about. Delegate a primary admin, and one or two secondary global admins. Only assign project-based admin roles to users who are truly leads for those projects. Also, reduce workflow schemes and custom fields if you can. Simplifying these objects allow you to manage fewer individual fields that could be exploited.
While this sounds similar to the first point, there are a couple distinct differences. Organizing puts your stuff into neat piles (or tools), documentation is the stuff you put in those piles. Use Confluence and a diagramming tool to depict your environment and network. Keep it up to date. If you know your network and environment like the back of your hand, you will inherently have a better understanding of any security gaps that might exist.
In a managed hosting arrangement with an expert like Contegix, you can delegate a great deal of the tedious system administration and security patching, along with more complicated tasks like performance tuning. You can even go as far as to trust your provider with performing critical security patches and updates. Experts like Contegix, can also assist with hardening your applications for greater security. When you invest in building a trust relationship with your provider, you’ll reduce your overall security stress; while, at the same time reaping the benefits of a more secure platform.
At Contegix, security matters. We understand the stress of the administrator and project owner. By being proactive and responsive to your security requests, we can help you focus on your real, strategic work. Our security team and support engineers are looking out for you and your team.
Let us know if you would like to discuss your current security posture and how we can help augment it with our services.