Security awareness on oversight

We bring the year to a close with an awareness and training module on a universal control that is applicable and valuable in virtually all situations in some form or other.  

Oversight blends monitoring and watching-over with directing, supervising and guiding, a uniquely powerful combination.

The diversity and flexibility of the risk and control principles behind oversight are applied naturally by default, and can be substantially strengthened where appropriate. Understanding the fundamentals is the first step towards making oversight more effective, hence this is a cracker of an awareness topic with broad relevance to information risk and security, compliance, governance, safety and all that jazz.

It’s hard to conceive of a security awareness and training program that would not cover oversight, but for most it is implicit, lurking quietly in the background.  We have drawn it out, putting it front and center.  

In the most general sense, very few activities would benefit from not being overseen in some fashion, either by the people and machines performing them or by third parties.

To a large extent, management is the practical application of oversight.  It’s also fundamental to governance, compliance and many controls, including most of those in information risk and security. 

Imagine if you can a world without any form of oversight where:

• People and organizations were free to do exactly as they wish without fear of anyone spotting and reacting to their activities;
• Robotic machines operated totally autonomously, with nobody monitoring or controlling them;
• Organizations, groups and individuals acted with impunity, doing whatever they felt like without any guidance, direction or limits, nobody checking up on them or telling them what to do or not to do;
• Compliance was optional at best, and governance was conspicuously absent. 

Such a world may be utopia for anarchists, egocentrics and despots but a nightmare scenario for information risk and security professionals, and for any civilized society!