When someone says the word security, it is highly likely that each person that hears the word will form their own, unique interpretation of what the word means. Because security encompasses so many individual practices such as Risk, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Audit, Compliance, Information Security, the security industry has built strong industries in each of these areas, at the detriment of suffering from a lack of Comprehensive Inclusion.

What is Comprehensive Inclusion? Comprehensive Inclusion is the concept of building solutions, developing strategies and communicating openly across the myriad practices and sub-industries within an industry as a whole. Security industry sectors tend to practice in isolation. Solution sets that have potential for application across more than one sector, can suffer from myopic vision, thought leadership and marketing. Communications across these sectors is often times fragmented or inhibited, thus slowing progress on truly global improvements and advancements. Lastly, because of the nature of the Security industry and the issues it deals with, even communications within the same sub-industries or sectors suffers or is non-existent.

Enter the Upper Midwest Security Alliance (UMSA). UMSA’s mission is to unite upper Midwest security-related organizations in a trusted community for interdisciplinary collaboration and education. UMSA’s members are professional and educational organizations that focus on the various practices of Security. Through its mission and driven by it vision to establish the upper Midwest as the acknowledged leader for the development of security-related professionals, organization and practices, UMSA is working to establish collaboration and partnering opportunities for its members as well as the Security community as a whole.

UMSA is driving change in the way that our Security communities interact, communicate and cooperate in solving some of the most pressing business and community technology risk issues that we face today. UMSA is striving to enable open and comprehensive collaboration as we develop solutions to these issues. This can only be done by comprehensively including and engaging with all practices within Security. I’m very proud to be a part of UMSA!