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Outsourcing Information Security
When it comes to the outsourcing of information security functions specifically, the situation is even worse. Far too few organizations know the inherent risks involved with outsourcing security, and don't properly investigate what they are getting into. The same company that makes it nearly impossible for an employee to enter the office supply closet to get much needed toner cartridge will outsource their intrusion detection, email and firewall systems without a blink.
One of the many reasons companies turn to security outsourcing and managed security services providers (MSSP) is to use their limited internal security staff for more interesting areas such as web development, VPN and e-commerce applications. They will then outsource the boring activities such as firewall and IDS monitoring and maintenance to a MSSP.
Given that activities such as firewall monitoring and administering an IDS in large enterprise requires 24/7 support, it is not unusual for a company to want to outsource such activities; monitoring and administering are not core functions of most organizations.
The trouble comes from the lack of due care often given to choosing a MSSP. With that, Outsourcing Information Security is a long-overdue book that asks the questions that are necessary before an organization decides to outsource any information security function.
The author's general tone is against the outsourcing of information security; but provides readers with the various benefits and risks involved in outsourcing security, and let's them ultimate decide if outsourcing security is right for their organization. It is the reader who must define, evaluate and manage those risks and determine if outsourcing is a viable solution. These include technology, business and legal risks.
The book comprises nine chapters and three appendices totaling a bit under 250 pages. The first two chapters provide a good introduction to and overview of outsourcing and information security, and the associated security risks.
Chapter 3 details various reasons why outsourcing information security makes sense. The chapter includes various tables and references to the many reasons why a company would want to outsource security.
Chapter 4 takes the other side and analyzes the risks of outsourcing. The chapter details the traditional risks, in addition to other factors such as hidden costs, broken promises, phantom benefits and more. The book shows that while many organizations hand over information security responsibility to their MSSP, when things go wrong, they can't effectively blame the MSSP. When things go wrong -- and they will -- all of the fingers in the world can be pointed at the MSSP, but the ultimate responsibility falls on the organization itself. With outsourced security, if something goes wrong, those fingers will point back to the company's security manager, not the incompetent firewall administrator in Bangalore.
The chapter provides a balanced look at the risk of outsourcing, and while calm in its overall approach, the chapter should at least make the person considering outsourcing information security think twice. In fact, the author concludes the chapter by stating "when all of the risks of outsourcing are considered, one wonders how anyone ever makes the decision to use a third party." Nonetheless, there is plenty of evidence that many security activities are indeed outsourced to MSSP, and are often satisfactory from both the buyer's and seller's perspective.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide a thorough summary of the costs and benefits of outsourcing, and provides a method with which to categorize them. The chapter is well suited for a CFO with its discussion of direct vs. indirect costs, controllable vs. non-controllable costs, and much more. These two chapters show that creating meaningful financial numbers to see if outsourcing makes financial sense is not such an easy task. It is important to understand that outsourcing sometimes makes financial sense, but certainly not all the time. For those organizations that don't crunch the numbers seriously at the beginning, these costs can later come back to haunt them in a big way.
Chapters 7 and 8 detail the processes involved in commencing an outsourcing project, from requirements gathering to placing policy against the outsourced company. A mistake many organizations make is failure to ensure that the MSSP is abiding by the client's information security policies, rather than their own.
Similarly, one of the most overlooked areas of outsourcing information security functionality is regulation. A U.S. company may be under numerous regulations, from HIPAA to Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, SEC and more; when they outsource their security functionality, the remote technician may not be under the jurisdiction of the SEC; but the corporate data still must be protected according to those regulations.
The main part of the book concludes with chapter 9, which provides a 20-step process to determine if an outsourced security solution is appropriate. In seven pages, the author specifies the various events, tasks and steps that make up the typical outsourcing project.
Appendix A provides a breakdown of the various services that can be outsourced, with Appendices B & C providing brief histories of IT Outsourcing and Information Security.
The only downside to the book is its $85.00 price, which is at the high-end for technology and business books. While the price is high, the book is a huge value for anyone considering outsourcing security. The book asks the questions that are often never asked, and details how the outsourcing of information security is not the slam-dunk that the MSSPs often portray it to be.
For those who know what their security issues are and look to outsource their security functionality to a trusted MSSP, Outsourcing Information Security shows how it can be done. On the other side, for those who are drunk with the panacea that outsourcing security is supposed to provide, Outsourcing Information Security will be a sobering wake-up call.
You can purchase Outsourcing Information Security from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
To me all the outsourcing problems can be resumed to a simple allegory : cooking.
Home-cooked and cafeteria; sure you'll eat just fine at the end of the day, but chances are the cafeteria food will taste bad, cost less in the short term (efforts + money) but more in the long term, and doesn't have the nice 'home' feeling.
And you're never sure if the cook is on a bad day and spit in your soup (security allusion, for those who don't get it).
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
cannot be complete without chapter 11.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
My President says so.
Those books should be pretty secure on the bookstore shelves.
That aside though I think its about time people quit whining about how inherently evil outsourcing is. Many companies outsource everything from cleaning and security to payrole and management advise.
Of course if you outsource security there is a risk, just the same as you risk one of your own employees fucking you over if you keep it in house. Proper investigation and dilligence are required. Thats not to say outsourcing is an inherently bad thing. In many cases companies will gain from outsourcing to specialist companies who can offer greater competency than could be achieved inhouse.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Ask yourself this. Were do you want your secrets to reside?
Who do you trust to watch them?
No matter where the seed lies now a days companies have gown much bigger than the nation itself. Companies have become multinational trananational and their products and suppliers are all intetwined spanning multiple countries. So like it or not work is also going to be distributed and spread over many nations. Protection of intellectual properties and the like has to be developed within the organisation in consultation with the service provider or third party vendors. Taking an lazy outsiders look into the internal workings of an multinational company will not help to understand the extent of globalisation in every activities.
If you want to protect yourself, always ask your bank, medical clinic, etc. whether it outsources information processing to China or India. If the answer is "yes", then find another place to do business.
Are you really this naive?
Your bank will answer "Sir, we are doing everything in our power to protect your privacy", or "the contractors with work with are fully accredited by us to handle your personal data" or something sybilline like this. They'd never admit flatly that they outsource to a shitty data center in a third world country. If they did, there'd be no problem since people would walk out the door without a second thought.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There is a big debate in Canada about outsourcing to US based companies due to the fact that the Patriot Act allows the FBI access to databases. Canada has fairly strict privacy laws and the liability of sending this information to the US could be big since there is no way for a US company to refuse the FBI access. The British Columbian government is still thinking of going ahead with sending of medical information down to the United States. It should be an interesting election day issue come next April when the voters go to the polls for the local elections...
I disagree...I know many business managers that would happily accept information of their competitors upcoming marketting campaigns/products.
Not everyone is as logical as you are...not everyone sees or expects a downside.
And for a lot of people, having that edge can be worth significant bonuses in their pay packet, and is worth the minimal risk of getting busted.
No, nobody wants your data, get that through your head!
You my friend need to do a reality check. People out there want your data. However meaningless items of data. *BAD*.
* Spammers want your email, as you point out
* Marketdroids want your consuming habits
* Health insurance folks want your latest medical checkup and your average cigarette consumption
* Car insurance companies want your tickets and warnings
* Pedophiles want your kids' school timetables
* The IRS want your overseas banking records
* Bubba from da 'hood wants to know when you take holidays
Please get real...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Although I think offshoring will eventually gut our economy[*], if a company is going to offshore, then they should do it more effectively. Communicating business requirements to offshore teams can be tricky and time-consuming in itself.
I realize during recent programming projects that there are often little things that can be outsourced in order to help a developer deal with business logic more and technical issues less.
For example, a program crashes and you cannot figure out where it crashes. These kinds of tasks would be served well by somebody offshore. You only have to give them the program and ask them to find out why it crashes. They don't have to understand the business logic, only how to debug that language.
Another time we needed some test data. The developer could create a sample pattern and then offshore the data entry of similar entries.
Thus, a horizontal division of labor may be more effective than a verticle division.
[*] So will the alternative. I think the US does not offer anything economically special anymore, and we will become an also-ran economy. "Innovation" does not help much because much of the actual development of ideas can also be offshored these days. Thus, the source of innovation no longer generates as many local jobs as it used to. For every good idea there may be say 200 people bringing it to fruit. Now maybe only 50 of these remain local, for example.
Table-ized A.I.
Could it be that many Slashdotters have also seen big problems with quality, related to off-shoring? And although much of it can be attributed to lack of normal decent oversight, resulting from greedy optimism, there are also some inherent problems... at least with the common system of half-ass transitioning of "boring" tasks to remote countries like India (remote as in having significant timezone different to US).
Personally I'm not all that afraid of losing my job (either the current one, or in general) -- I'm good enough to earn my living, with my talent, skills and experience, even with lower-paid competition. But I despise most of current off-shoring efforts, since as an engineer, it's obvious to me why they have problems. And although I could work on improving it (there are many things that could be done to improve things), there's little benefit. I can get things done using local workers, to be profitable, it's less hassle (out of sight, out of mind...); and on top of that, I can see competitors wasting good money on bad ideas. What's not to like?
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Is not about providing better cheaper IT security services. It is about shifting liability.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
And in the end, does it really matter?
/ c/ a/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL
Anyone remember the story about how a Pakistani medical services person was holding up some records for ransom? Turned out that an SF hospital had outsourced their medical record transcription to a Sausalito (just north of SF) firm which outsourced some of this work to a Florida company which outsourced some of this work to a Texas company which outsourced some of this work to this Pakistani person.
No, seriously, think I'm engaging in hyperbole here? Check this out:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
So if you asked UCSF Medical Center "do you outsource information processing to China or India?" they'd honestly be able to say say "Oh, hell no! In fact, we even require our contractors not outsource anything to those countries or to anyone who outsources anything to those countries!"
Bleh.
Keep in mind, outsourced security firms aren't domestically regulated like banks or other groups. If you can't "sue", "arrest" or otherwise influence the people watching you, then why give them the keys?
Outsourcing security seems like a good paradigm at first, but trust is earned. Here, we have serious certifications (clearances, CISSP, credit ratings, background checks, bonding, etc.) and there's a definite degree of employer influence over their employees.
Maybe its just me, but whenever someone I don't know says, "Trust me! C'mon, take a chance, live a little, all the cool CEOs are doing it" I'd conclude right away that these guys are going to ruin me. Mostly because, up until now, "TRUST ME" hasn't been too much of a necessity in outsourcing.
Anyway, outsourcing security could be one of the next "Great" phishing scams, after all -- why go for the salad when someone can go for the five course meal.
Losers.. for the nth time understand the difference between outsource and off-shore..
Where the fuck was all this anti-offshoring movement when nike / reebok was selling you cheaper shoes (made in india/china), most of your apparel is made by the asian-tigers and a third world country like bangladesh. Now that you are losing your jobs (in the IT industry) you think it's not fair??? where were you when the others were losing their jobs???
First elect a president who is more concerned for america rather than unsuccessfully being world-police. Maybe things will change for you in due time.
and once again (n+1).. Outsourcing is not equal to off-shoring
What we really need to have are results of outsourcing. Sure, we've heard of Dell and a few other companies pulling work back to the US, but I doubt we'll ever hear of the failures or, for that matter, how bad it failed in terms of money and effort. I find it amazing that no investigative work has been done on reporting about the real effectiveness of outsourcing. My friend works for an IT recruiting company and they were told that Chase and another bank were quietly restaffing their US workers after moving most of their work overseas. The recruitment is for 4,000 workers for Chase alone. After the effort, move, and training, it turns out that they were getting the work at the same price, but now the quality sucked and were getting complaints from customers.
One of the first things you learn about properly securing any network is that a demarcation of responsibilities is critical.
I may be a gun security expert, who can design a bulletproof Firewall\IDS\Mandatory ACL schema\Managed virus control architecture for you, but AS A PERMANENT EMPLOYEE I am the last person you want deploying it and administering it.
Why?
Cos if I designed it and hold the keys to it, you know I am gonna eventually open up port 22 so I can futz about with my home machines. And then I might decide I really need to get the latest distro real quick and open up a few BT ports.
I can see how outsourcing security would help enforce that demarcation. Part of the outsourcing process would include determining who can authorise changes to the filters etc, and that means the organisation at least has to think about those issues.
And at the end of the day, around 80% of all data integrity\theft\leakage\etc issues originate from internal employess, not the black-hat external hackers everyone jumps up and down about.
Sure - use someone internal, with knowledge of your environment and needs to design the security posture, but let someone else deploy it and administer it.
I think many firms think outsourcing security is safer as they see their employees as their worst risk. I've watched managers knowingly do horrible things to employees...then they become paranoid that they employees with act in retribution.
To a large extent, employees are a worse threat since they will learn the company's weaknesses. The growing distrust between management and workers is scary.
Anyway, my experience is that managers who perceive themselves in a different class than workers don't like delegating secutity to members of the class they disparage.
"No, Bush jr. isn't like Hitler; he's more like that clown, Mussolini.
That's why I call him 'Il Douche'
Bush is a lot like Mussolini in that Mussolini wanted fascism to be the combination of state and corporation. Bush's espoused ideology is communitarianism which when analyzed using semiotics is shown to be highly similar to fascism. Not totalitarianism, fascism.
... I did an outsourcing gig earlier this year. I was flogging my resume trying to find work when this recruiter called me and asked me to do a weekend job doing an upgrade rollout at a major bank.
I was told to show up on Friday afternoon and that I'd be working with a group pretty much all weekend. No one took a look at my ID, or had me sign anything. They believed me that I was eligible to work in the US even though most of my resume was working outside of the states. Asking around I found that this was the case with most of the forty odd nerds they had rounded up for the job.
We were all working for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a major IT firm from Texas. We were all given pretty much free reign of the executive offices and all shared the same username and password. There was basically no supervision what so ever.
It would have been so easy to install a good deal of malicious software... heck, it wouldn't have been that hard to swap out the master image to take over pretty much every machine on the network.
I don't even want to think of what goes on in third world countries. That weekend really made me second guess what goes on in the US. If the bank had it's own IT staff, seven people who could work together could have done the same job that it took about sixty including supervisors and honchos and I am sure the cost of their salaries for a year was less than was wasted on that crew. The upside was they did buy us good pizza!!!