Security and IT Glossary

Security and IT Glossary provides a comprehensive overview of key terminology, acronyms, processes, and tools in the ITIL, ITSM, SecOps, InfoSec, and GRC domains. It can serve as a valuable resource for anyone seeking to understand these concepts in-depth.

Security and IT Glossary Practices & Process

This list encompasses key practices and concepts in the domains of IT, Security Operations, Asset Management, Governance, Risk, and Compliance. It provides a comprehensive overview of essential elements for effective IT management and security.

A-D Security and IT Glossary

• AI (Artificial Intelligence): Employing machine-based simulation of human intelligence.
• Asset Management: Strategically managing an organization’s assets, including hardware, software, and other resources, to optimize usage, reduce costs, and ensure compliance.
• CMDB (Configuration Management Database): Serving as a centralized repository, it contains comprehensive information about an organization’s IT assets, configurations, and relationships. This aids in efficient change and configuration management.
• Compliance Management: Actively ensuring that an organization’s IT practices and processes meticulously adhere to relevant regulations, standards, and best practices.
• Delivering Service Excellence: Efficiently executing processes, activities, and practices involved in delivering IT services to users or customers, ensuring that services consistently meet agreed-upon service levels.

E-I Security and IT Glossary

• Enhancing Service Asset Configuration Management: Proactively managing the lifecycle of service assets through Service Asset Configuration Management (SACM). This process includes identifying assets, tracking relationships, and ensuring accurate configuration data for optimal service delivery.
• Facilitating Walk-Up Experience: Smoothly allowing users to approach IT service desks or support centers in person for prompt assistance or resolution of issues, without requiring prior appointments.
• Fusing SecOps (Security Operations): Seamlessly integrating security practices with IT operations, ensuring security measures are an intrinsic part throughout the development, deployment, and management of IT services.
• Generative AI: Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that leverages machine learning systems capable of generating text, images, code or other types of content, often in response to a prompt entered by a user.
• Guiding GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance): Employing a framework and practices to align organizational objectives, risk management efforts, and compliance initiatives, ensuring effective governance and adherence to regulations.
• Hardware Asset Management (HAM): Efficiently managing an organization’s hardware assets, including procurement, deployment, tracking, and disposal, to ensure optimal utilization and cost control.
• Handling Incidents: Actively managing and swiftly resolving unplanned disruptions to IT services, minimizing impact and promptly restoring normal operations.
• Hyperautomation: Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, event-driven software architecture, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process and task automation tools.
• Implementing ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library): Applying a set of practices for IT service management that aligns IT services with business needs, offering an effective framework for organizing and delivering IT services.
• Implementing IT Operations Management: Actively executing processes to ensure the availability, performance, and reliability of IT services, systems, and infrastructure. This involves orchestrating tasks, evaluating performance, and optimizing resources for seamless operations.
• ITSM: Providing software solutions specifically designed to support ITSM processes, such as incident management, change management, and service catalog. Notable examples include ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, FreshService and Jira Service Management.

J-N Security and IT Glossary

• Knowledge Management: ITSM knowledge management process is a framework that enables an organization to capture, store, and share knowledge and experience with the goal of improving the quality and efficiency of IT service management as well as AI Knowledged Centered Support to advance the KM experience.
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator): Utilized as metrics to measure the performance and effectiveness of IT processes, services, and overall operations.
• Leveraging Predictive Intelligence: Utilizing historical data, machine learning, and analytics to predict future trends, behaviors, and outcomes, enabling proactive decision-making.
• Maintaining the CMDB: Continuously updating and refining the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) by systematically recording and managing configuration items. This process involves tracking changes, maintaining accuracy, and facilitating effective decision-making.
• Managing Change: Orchestrating the planning, evaluation, and control of changes to IT systems, applications, and processes to minimize service disruptions and ensure the smooth implementation of changes.
• Managing IT Operations: Overseeing the processes and activities that ensure the availability, performance, and reliability of IT services, systems, and infrastructure.
• Mastering Service Management: Proficiently designing, delivering, and managing IT services to precisely meet organizational and customer needs, while ensuring the delivery of services is efficient and effective.

O-S Security and IT Glossary

• Optimizing Asset Management: Strategically managing an organization’s assets, including hardware, software, and other resources, to enhance usage, mitigate risks, and streamline costs. This entails efficiently tracking assets, assessing needs, and aligning resources with business objectives.
• Optimizing Portfolio Management: Skillfully managing a collection of IT projects, services, and investments to align with business goals, prioritize resources, and skillfully allocate resources.
• Patch Management: Actively identifying, testing, and applying software patches and updates to systems and applications. This process is crucial to address security vulnerabilities and enhance performance.
• Risk Assessment: Actively evaluating potential risks to information systems, data, and operations. This evaluation leads to the development of strategic approaches for effective risk mitigation.
• Root Cause Analysis: Engaging in the process of identifying the underlying causes of incidents or problems. This analysis is vital in preventing the recurrence of issues.
• Software Asset Management (SAM): Effectively managing an organization’s software assets, including licensing, usage, and compliance, to minimize risks and costs.
• Securing InfoSec (Information Security): Practicing the safeguarding of information and information systems against unauthorized access, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
• Showcasing Service Catalog: Presenting a comprehensive list of IT services offered by an organization, providing comprehensive information about available services, service levels, and guidance on requesting and accessing them.
• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): Providing tools that perform real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware. These tools offer valuable insights into potential security threats.
• SLA (Service Level Agreement): Serving as a formal agreement between an IT service provider and its customers. It outlines agreed-upon service levels, response times, and performance metrics.

M-Z Security and IT Glossary

• Uncovering Problem Causes: Diligently identifying root causes of recurring incidents, systematically addressing underlying issues, and implementing preventive measures.

Security and IT Glossary of Roles

By actively engaging with awareness of these roles, organizations can effectively manage their security operations, ITIL practices, IT service management, and IT service delivery, ensuring optimal service quality and security.

Security Operations Roles:

• Incident Responder: Swiftly reacting to security incidents, they contain and mitigate impacts, identify root causes, and implement measures to prevent future occurrences.
• Security Analyst: Responsibly monitoring security events, analyzing alerts, and responding to potential incidents to safeguard information systems.
• Security Engineer: Focused on designing, implementing, and maintaining security systems and infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, and encryption mechanisms.
• Security Operations Center (SOC) Manager: Overseeing day-to-day SOC operations, they coordinate incident response, manage security analysts, and ensure effective communication.
• Threat Intelligence Analyst: Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about emerging threats, they provide actionable insights to proactively address potential security risks.

ITIL Roles:

• Change Manager: Responsible for overseeing change management, assessing proposed changes, coordinating approvals, and ensuring minimal disruptions during implementation.
• Problem Manager: Focusing on identifying root causes of recurring incidents, implementing preventive measures, and collaborating with other teams to address underlying issues.
• Service Desk Analyst: Serving as the frontline support, they resolve incidents, answer queries, and manage service requests for smooth service delivery.
• Service Owner: Accountable for end-to-end delivery of a specific IT service, including strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual improvement.
• IT Service Manager: Ensuring effective service management, they align services with business needs, manage providers, and drive service enhancements.

ITSM Roles:

• Change Coordinator: Assisting the change manager, they coordinate and schedule change requests, communicate with stakeholders, and ensure smooth implementations.
• IT Asset Manager: Overseeing IT asset lifecycle, they track, utilize, and ensure compliance with software and hardware licenses.
• IT Service Delivery Manager: Overseeing overall service delivery, they align with business needs, manage resources, and maintain service quality.
• Service Catalog Manager: Creating and maintaining the service catalog, they ensure accuracy in available services, service levels, and related information.
• Service Level Manager: Monitoring and maintaining SLAs, they negotiate targets and collaborate with teams to meet agreed-upon performance standards.

ITSD Roles:

• Configuration Manager: Responsible for managing and maintaining the configuration management database (CMDB), ensuring accurate records of IT assets and configurations.
• Release Manager: Overseeing planning, coordination, and deployment of software releases, they minimize disruptions and ensure successful updates.
• Service Desk Coordinator: Coordinating service desk activities, they ensure timely responses, maintain user communication, and streamline service processes.
• Service Request Fulfillment Coordinator: Managing service request fulfillment, they ensure efficient and timely delivery of requested services to users.

Security and IT Glossary of Tools

ITIL/ITSM Tools:

• ServiceNow: A versatile ITSM platform that supports various ITIL processes, streamlining service management and improving operational efficiency.
• BMC Helix Remedy ITSM: A comprehensive ITSM solution that offers incident management, change management, and other ITIL-aligned processes for enhanced service delivery.
• Cherwell Ivanti Service Management: An ITSM tool enabling organizations to automate workflows, manage incidents, and align services with business needs.
• Jira Service Management: Part of the Atlassian suite, it provides ITSM capabilities, including incident management and service request handling.
• Freshservice: An intuitive ITSM solution with capabilities for incident management, change management, and asset management, enhancing service operations.

ITOM Tools:

• SolarWinds NPM: A network performance monitoring tool that provides real-time insights into network health, facilitating proactive troubleshooting.
• Dynatrace: An application performance monitoring tool that offers deep insights into application behavior and helps optimize user experience.
• Nagios: An open-source IT monitoring solution that allows monitoring of network, server, and application performance.
• Splunk: A data analytics platform that offers real-time insights into machine data, enabling IT operations to identify issues and trends.

SACM Tools:

• ServiceNow Configuration Management: Part of ServiceNow’s suite, it facilitates maintaining an accurate and up-to-date configuration management database (CMDB).
• Cherwell Asset Management: Offers capabilities to track and manage IT assets throughout their lifecycle, aiding in effective asset management.

DevOps Tools:

• Jenkins: An open-source automation server that facilitates continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• GitLab: A comprehensive DevOps platform that provides source code management, CI/CD, and collaboration tools in a single application.
• CircleCI: A cloud-based CI/CD platform that automates build, test, and deployment processes for faster software delivery.
• Travis CI: A continuous integration platform that helps automate building, testing, and deploying code changes.
• Red Hat Ansible: An open-source automation tool that simplifies configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.

SecOps Tools:

• Burp Enterprise: Burp Suite Enterprise Edition is Enterprise server class solution for automated and scheduling continuous scanning solutions.
• Splunk Enterprise Security: A SIEM solution that enables real-time monitoring, threat detection, and incident response.
• Qualys: A cloud-based security and compliance platform that offers vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and asset inventory.
• CrowdStrike Falcon: An endpoint security solution that provides real-time threat detection, response, and protection against malware and breaches.
• Tenable: A vulnerability management platform that identifies, assesses, and prioritizes vulnerabilities across the IT environment.

GRC Tools:

• RSA Archer: A GRC platform that facilitates risk management, compliance, and operational risk assessments.
• MetricStream: Offers a range of GRC solutions including risk management, compliance management, and internal audit.
• LogicGate: A GRC platform that enables organizations to automate risk and compliance processes, enhancing decision-making and efficiency.
• ServiceNow GRC: Part of the ServiceNow suite, it offers modules for risk management, compliance, policy management, and audit.

Security and IT Glossary of Key References

• Acronym Finder
• Gartner Glossary
• Healthcare IT Glossary (CIO.com)
• ITIL IT Process Glossary
• National Institute of Standards and Technology Glossary
• Project Management Glossary (CIO.com)
• SANS Glossary of Cybersecurity Terms
• Wireless Technology Glossary (CIO.com)

Security and IT Glossary of Best Practice Professional and Networking Groups

1. Association of Artificial Intelligence and RPA
   • Association of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2. Global CyberFraud Prevention:
   • Enterprise Global Cyber Fraud Prevention- Methods: Detection & Mitigation, & IS Best Practices
3. HDI (Help Desk Institute) Best Practice Groups:
   • HDI Official Website: https://www.thinkhdi.com/
4. ISACA Best Practice Groups:
   • ISACA Official Website: https://www.isaca.org/
5. ITIL Best Practice Groups:
   • ITIL Official Website: https://www.axelos.com/best-practice-solutions/itil
6. ITSM Best Practice Groups:
   • IT Service Management Forum (itSMF): https://www.itsmf.org/
   • ITSMF Chicago LinkedIn Group ITSMF -IT Service Management Forum- Chicago IL
   • ITSMF San Francisco Group itSMF San Francisco Bay LIG
   • ServiceNow Community: https://community.servicenow.com/
7. Jobs n Career Success:
   • Jobs n Career Success LinkedIn Group: Jobs n Career Success Network
8. SecOps Best Practice Groups:
   • Information Systems Security Association (ISSA): https://www.issa.org/
   • International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP): https://iapp.org/