Impact of corporate governance on information security practices in (UK) financial industry

The empirical study of this paper focuses particularly on the UK financial industry fortrends in the framework of policies in order to manage information security as operational risk andhow corporate governance plays a vital role in framing policies within the company (Poole andCISM, 2006). The increasing dependency of UK financial industries on IT solutions and services tomanage their business processes has indirectly coupled the financial IT systems to the economic wellbeing of a country. This means that risks associated with such financial IT systems would have animpact on the economic elements of a nation. As more and more UK financial industries relies on ITsolutions to manage their businesses, Information security (IS) trails are increasingly becoming a partof general audit practices within these UK financial industries. IS and IT audit trails for riskassessment includes a number of risk elements like data security, firewall, server, network,application, etc. Corporate governance policies are mostly excluded from IS audits as there is noregulated roadmap for assessment. However some companies adopted industry wide standards likeCOBIT and ISO but still unregulated by government authorities. Hence this research investigates thesignificance of corporate governance policies towards the development of a robust IS framework inthe financial industry. It also looks at the government authority‘s role as a watchdog.