We’re all familiar with old school consultants. These are people hired at $20/hr and rented out for $150/hr. It’s good business, if you can get it. All too often, however, the work is neither enjoyable for the consultant nor useful to the client. After years of trying and failing to make the old model work, I decided it was time to throw it out and start over. Thankfully, RJS agreed. As of today, we are one year into the process of reinventing security consulting.
The fundamental difference is that we’ve fully embraced the fact that the idea of 100% security is a trap. You can never be completely secure, so why base a security project around the idea that you can be? Instead, we focus on achieving a measurable improvement over “today.” Different businesses have vastly different security needs, so once you shift the goal away from “find and fix all the problems” to “strike a balance between defense and response,” myriad solutions become available.
Having a large number of solutions is great, as we can select the one that fits your company’s unique situation the best. But remember, it’s not perfect and will need constant attention to avoid “analysis paralysis” and to stay current with new security trends. To combat this, we look at the second key difference: time-bound tasks, or as we call them, security sprints.
With anything you do, there is one resource that completely vanishes — time. Other consulting approaches focus on minimizing either money or an amorphous concept of risk. The catch with those is to clearly pre-identify “risk reduced” or “money saved,” time is required. Since time is billed, it can cost a significant amount of money to identify how much money you’re saving!
Want to know how much more secure a project will make you? Pick a small project that can be done in a week or two, do the project, then measure. There’s no guess-work, no scope-creep and most importantly, no spending more money than required to improve your defenses.
This process affords another advantage we did not anticipate. In many cases, security fails because the people put it in place to manage it are often not those responsible for maintaining it. Since security tends to weaken over time as attackers constantly improve, it is imperative that people explore alerts, identify what they mean to the business and take appropriate action. When the people who must manage the systems are not involved with the initial configuration, they tend to lose a lot of time tracking false alerts or worse, missing legitimate issues.
Since our consulting process is time-bound and focused on helping improve security after we leave, we work on a lot of small projects. These projects are designed so that, when done, they can be absorbed into the business’s existing operations. We then come back for iterative tuning engagements and, over time, help maximize the business’s use of technology. This avoids the common problem of security being “someone else’s” issue, while minimizing the disruption that new technologies can cause.
In the end, after a year’s experimentation, we’ve found that a cyclical short-project consulting model has given our clients a level of security far greater than the traditional defense-only approach. While this didn’t surprise us (after all, that’s why we did it), we were surprised to find that these engagements generally came in 25% to 50% lower in cost than the traditional model. We’ve done security assessments, implementations and strategy planning sessions and, in every case, have achieved better security at a lower cost.
Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about our sprint model and how it can help you achieve a better state of security at a fraction of the price.
Learn about our "Lean Security" methodology in comic book form!
