I was watching a few Twitter conversations about purchasing security last week and had yet another conversation about security ROI. This has me thinking about what we spend money on. In many industries we can spend our way out of problems, not all problems, but a lot of problems. With security if I gave you a blank check and said “fix it”, you couldn’t. Our problem isn’t money, it’s more fundamental than that.
Spend it like you got it
First let’s think about how some problems can be solved with money. If you need more electricity capacity, or more help during a busy time, or more computing power, it’s really easy to add capacity. You need more compute power, you can either buy more computers or just spend $2.15 in the cloud. If you need to dig a big hole, for a publicity stunt on Black Friday, you just pay someone to dig a big hole. It’s not that hard.
This doesn’t always work though, if you’re building a new website, you probably can’t buy your way to success. If a project like this falls behind it can be very difficult to catch back up. You can however track progress which I would say is at least a reasonable alternative. You can move development to another group or hire a new consultant if the old one isn’t living up to expectations.
More Security
What if we need “more” security. How can we buy our way into more security for our organization? I’d start by asking the question can we show any actual value for our current security investment? If you stopped spending money on security tomorrow do you know what the results would be? If you stopped buying toilet paper for your company tomorrow you can probably understand what will happen (if you have a good facilities department I bet they already know the answer to this).
This is a huge problem in many organizations. If you don’t know what would happen if you lowered or increased your security spending you’re basically doing voodoo security. You can imagine many projects and processes as having a series of inputs that can be adjusted. Things like money, time, people, computers, the list could go on. You can control these variables and have direct outcomes on the project. More people could mean you can spend less money on contractors, more computers could mean less time spent on rendering or compiling. Ideally you have a way to find the optimal levels for each of these variables resulting in not only a high return on investment, but also happier workers as they can see the results of their efforts.
We can’t do this with security today because security is too broad. We often don’t know what would happen if we add more staff, or more technology.
Fundamental fundamentals