Cybersecurity For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11

Cybersecurity and Big Businesses

IN THIS CHAPTER

Recognizing the differences between information security needs at large enterprises and small businesses

Understanding the role of the chief information security officer (CISO)

Exploring the regulations and standards that impact large enterprises

Many of the information security challenges facing large enterprises and small business are similar in nature. In fact, over the past decade, cloud-based offerings have brought to small businesses many well-protected systems sporting enterprise-class technologies, reducing some of the historical differences between firms of different sizes as far as the architecture of many major business systems is concerned. Of course, many security risks scale with enterprise size, but don’t qualitatively differ based on the number of employees, partners, and customers that a business has, or based on the size of its information technology budget.

At the same time, however, bigger companies often face significant additional complications — sometimes involving orders of magnitude more complexity than the challenges facing small businesses. A large number of diverse systems spread across geographies ...