Lessons for IT From the Super Bowl

Whichever team you favored—or even if you didn’t care one way or another—the 2017 Super Bowl was a contest for the ages. Never has any team come back from a 25-point deficit to win. Never has the Super Bowl been tied as time expired, forcing extended, overtime play. And rarely, if ever, has a football game provided such useful lessons for those responsible for IT and cybersecurity management.

Don’t panic

When an athlete is particularly dominant, observers often opine something like this: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

The same is true of cybersecurity. Industry experts and experienced users agree. There is no strategy that is guaranteed to stop every threat. But that’s no reason to panic. Instead, prepare. Implement cybersecurity tools and processes that can detect and prevent threats, and identify, isolate, and remediate successful attacks quickly and completely.

Also, make sure that your critical information is backed up regularly, to speed your users’ return to full productivity.

Do your job

For the New England Patriots—the American football team that won the Super Bowl so resoundingly—“do your job” is a guiding principle and best practice. The head coach structures his team and his playbook in ways designed to ensure that if a key player is injured, the team can quickly replace that player and continue to play well.

Perhaps more importantly, the “do your job” mantra instills in each player a passionate desire to avoid letting teammates and the team down by making mistakes. The most successful IT management and cybersecurity teams exhibit similar attitudes about their environments and enterprises. Everyone strives to do their best, all the time, to keep the business running and free from disruptive threats.

Recognize your Most Valuable Players (MVPs)

Even when everyone does their job to the best of their abilities, it’s important not to take consistent performance for granted. Perhaps a particular person or team stood out during recovery from a cybersecurity incident or outage. Maybe a user was attentive enough to spot and report a suspicious email before it could propagate ransomware or other malware across the enterprise.

Identify those individuals who make extra efforts that deliver benefits, and reward them with public praise, small gifts, or both. This will inspire others to achieve similar recognition, and show that your team’s “coaches” pay attention and appreciate that extra effort.

Make Ivanti part of your team

To support these and other winning efforts, you need a firm, flexible foundation for IT and security management. So when you’ve finished celebrating, commiserating, or ignoring the Super Bowl, check out Ivanti's solutions online, or contact an Ivanti representative. Let us show you how we can help you to craft and implement a consistently winning strategy for managing IT and cybersecurity at your enterprise.