InfoSec management hit the perfect storm. At the same time IT has exploded, budgets imploded. Our IT environments are growing due to consumerization, cloud computing, and sprawl. Our teams and budgets are shrinking due to the economic down turn. We are in an even tougher spot today that we were in 2008, when I began talking about the importance of driving information security from risk management.
We still have the same fundamental problems. How can we pitch the idea to our executive team? How can we secure this growing IT environment, when it is next to impossible to know what any one piece of it means to the business?
I have been driving my efforts from impact. We cannot defend what we do not understand. By mapping IT to the business activities it enables, and by performing an impact analysis, we can understand what all the stuff we are responsible for actually does. We can then tune the cost of security controls around the value of the IT assets.
Business continuity and risk management then flow naturally from this deeper understanding of our organization and how IT enables our organization to fulfill its mission.
These are #secbiz — or security in the business — concerns. I’d argue that impact driven risk management is a #secbiz approach. I made that argument today at a conference in Grand Rapids. I posted a copy of my talk online.
How asteroids falling from the sky improve security (GrrCon 2011)
http://blip.tv/j-wolfgang-goerlich/how-asteroids-falling-from-the-sky-improve-security-grrcon-2011-5561145
The next steps that I gave in my talk are continuing the conversation on Twitter under #sira and #secbiz, as well as joining the Society of Information Risk Analysts (SIRA) and the SecBiz group on LinkedIn. Please send some feedback my way. Is this is a good approach? What would make it better?
jwg
Note: This is the same talk. However, due to technical difficulties, the recording online is not the same as the one I gave in person. Same message, different out take.
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