Achieving Real IT Assurance Across System Boundaries

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Providing an adequate level of IT assurance for legal industry leaders has become a high-profile challenge, as firms of all sizes find themselves on the front lines of the global ransomware war.

Just last month, cyber hackers made a $42 million ransomware demand to a high-profile celebrity law firm in New York, and unfortunately these types of attacks are becoming more common. To compound this problem, the industry is faced with increasingly distributed IT systems, as cloud infrastructure, hosted applications, and outsourced services blur the boundaries between your firm and the rest of the world. So let's define the issues and discuss actionable steps all legal industry leaders can oversee to provide effective IT assurance activities that will help keep your firm from becoming the next victim.

As we enter the new decade, our information systems are more interconnected than they have ever been. And this trend will not only continue, but accelerate. A typical organization computer system is interconnected with an entire ecosystem consisting of numerous integrated entities, including: service vendors, cloud vendors, peers, clients, and your own internal shadow IT. And it does not stop there, as vendors and their applications are also integrated with other clients, service providers, etc.; the web of interconnectedness is almost endless.