Security Data Analytics and Reporting: Business Expectations and value - Part 2
Security Data Analytics and Reporting: Business Expectations & Value, part 1 explored the various people and entities that are connected to an organization and the expectations of different stakeholders. Every business has basic expectations of their technology, as it’s these systems that enable them to execute Business strategy.
This article is a look at what businesses expect of their IT Security. You’ll learn about the value of security to businesses and the importance of objectively providing security assurance to businesses and technology managers.
There will be companion series to specifically focus on the benefits businesses reap with cyber security, how to build a business case for SDAR, and different ways to integrate SDAR into an organization’s security systems..
Business expectations from the information security
A business’ primary expectation of its information security systems is to be assured that the technology is relatively safe to use.
Figure 01: A typical business’ expectations of its IT Security
Security assurance must be measurable, reasonably priced and, above all, reassure the business that its information can be trusted with the technology used by the organization.
It is not easy for security teams to prove the value of their security programs. Tangible security outcomes are typically limited by anti-Virus products, security tokens, security campaigns , awareness campaigns, broken devices and crippled user experiences due to excessive security controls.
These are not compelling outcomes and therefore, businesses often feel they cannot justify the investment of retaining security as a standalone function within IT or within the business in general. Some organizations even just have an executive for the regulators and governments, instead of a dedicated security team.
The key for security to demonstrate or market their worth lies in consolidated and correlated visibility into security, based on relevant metrics. In recent years, concepts like SIEM and SOAR have become a popular solution for security and these systems certainly addressed many common security concerns. However, in most cases, just these two systems don’t provide the full picture.
The value added to the business from security
Let’s say a business wants to know whether its investment into Identity & Access Management programs has been worthwhile. It also wants to see that the security team has delivered on its promise to protect their information by isolating identifiable individual or corporate devices from the unidentified one and then mitigate the threats from the unidentified devices or identities. Security teams must demonstrate that having control over user and/or device identity is critical and that when IT and security have control over the business’ technology landscape, businesses can focus on making money.
Security teams can address this on a periodic basis, thereby giving assurance to the business. However, security teams really add value when they provide assurance backed up with facts taken straight from the automated reporting, on a much more frequent basis.
Demonstrating the Business Benefits and value of IT Security
Security teams must find ways to objectively prove that the business’ security is working.The good news is that all of this can be achieved with logs, business data and useful metrics, specific to the business. The not-so-good news is that it takes considerable time for security teams to gather all this information. However, the important thing is to start the implementation and stay committed until the value is delivered.
Conclusion
Businesses expect their information security systems to provide security assurance. To some extent, businesses understand what successful security looks like. However, to prove that the investments into security programs are effective, stakeholders must feel the reports are relevant. When security teams take the above steps, they ensure that the organization has maximum visibility. The backbone in providing such reporting is Security Data Analytics and Reporting (SDAR).
In the next article, will discuss the viewpoints of stakeholders in detail. Subscribe to the blog to read more companion articles about the implementation of SDAR metrics.