Nice GRC write-up and how it relates to log management initiatives

Anton wrote a nice piece, called "Unified GRC: Replacing a piecemeal response to compliance" for SC Magazine defining GRC and how it fits together with other areas of security and prevention management. The article, as expected, has a major slant toward Log Management, but it is a very good summary that also highlights other key capabilities / areas important to GRC.

Even though most security vendors are marketing IT Risk Management, many customers are beginning to realize there is this new breed of software products that compliments your vulnerability, log, configuration security solutions. These IT GRC products normalize all the various regulatory or standardization controls into a common framework and then pull scores/results/data from these products into that model to go along-side data gathered from controls that can't be instrumented with software (e.g., people, processes, procedures, physical). As mentioned in previous posts, without this other side of the coin you're not getting a complete picture of risk/compliance/governance.

So if you you've already made investments in these other products but need something to pull them together into a unified view and are looking to get the complete picture, come check out IT GRC.

IT GRC is the next evolution for the Enterprise Security Organization

Great write-up and perspectives from the GRC guru, Michael Rasmussen; What is IT GRC?

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Interestingly enough, I was at an event last week of a dozen senior IT executives and we discussed this concept of IT-GRC. These were all Fortune 500 firms. Going around the room each was spending on average 5-6% of their IT budget this year on IT-GRC. A few were lower than this in the 2-3% range while one, who was significantly working on their IT-GRC strategy, was spending about 12% of their IT budget on IT-GRC.
-/snip-

Bottom line, the solutions in the IT-GRC space continue to mature and evolve, BUT the truth is - they can and will help save Fortune 500 IT Security organizations money through automation today! There is no reason a Fortune 500 company should be spending this much of their IT budget on IT-GRC when these products today significantly reduce the amount of manual labor (consultants) performing these governance, risk & compliance duties.

Great tutorial on Information Security Program Metrics

While reading a blog posting this morning I came across a great set of slides called "Measuring Security."

Slide 15 nails what are the questions security programs should answer on the head...
How secure am I?
Am I better off than this time last year?
Am I spending the right amount of money?
How do I compare to my peers?
What risk transfer options do I have?

Slide 36 has a great quote on "Risk Management"
The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome, while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcomes and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.

The next 300 slides is a ton of background detail...overkill until your really ready to dig in. I would simply recommend for now jumping to slide 402 to get to the punchline; here are some of the recommended metrics:

• Cost of security per transaction
• DoS and other attack downtimes
• Data flow per transaction & per source
• Budget correlation with risk measures
• Comparison with like firms
• Percentage of critical systems under DR plan
• Percentage of systems obeying ______ policy
• MTBF & MTTR for security incidents
• Number of security team consultations
• Latency to obey ______ change orders
• Percentage of job reviews involving security
• Percentage of security workers with training
• Ratio of b.u. security staff to central staff
• New system timely security consultations
• Percentage of programs with budgeted security
• Percentage of SLAs with security standards
• Percentage of tested external-facing applications
• Number of non-employees with access
• Percentage of data secure-by-default
• Percentage of customer data outside data center

Where all this detail is extremely important, the beautiful thing about what Securityworks offers is it has built a method to normalize any/all metrics into a single score. Think of it as your grade point average where you then have the ability to drill-down from the top and see how your doing for each subject, on each test, homework assignment, etc.

Going beyond technical security controls

Anton last week had this great write-up in ComputerWorld, "Five Basic Mistakes of Security Policy," that hits the 5 basics that so many busy executives look past when leading a security organization.

1. Not having a policy
2. Not updating the policy
3. Not tracking compliance with the policy
4. Having a "tech only" policy
5. Having a large, unwieldy policy

One of the biggest we see every day is #4. Most enterprises have some policy in place that they update (typically annually before a pending audit). Their current compliance tracking is provided by one or more software products that unfortunately don't have the full picture.

The reason why comes down to #4. Traditionally, enterprises have thrown either a vulnerability scanner, security event/log manager or another security software application at a list of IP addressable assets...generate a few reports...and hope they have things covered.

The truth be told, this misses so much of the full picture (over 50% per previous blog posts) that even the internal or external auditors don't have enough time to do a comprehensive review. The goal of those auditors is not a "witch hunt," it's suppose to be to protect the company! So what happens is each year, things get more and more detailed (which is good) as findings from the prior year are addressed allowing them to "peel the onion" back another layer.

This is why we are seeing the emergence of the IT GRC market that compliments and extends these products you point at IP addressable assets. These solutions use automation techniques to assess security controls around things that are not IP addressable (e.g., people, processes, facilities). The other need these products are offering is a normalized, unified view of the entire security program. Leveraging scoring from other products, they finally deliver the possibility of 100% visibility into the posture of your entire IT security, risk or compliance program.