Why Upper Management Doesn't "Get" IT Security

Schneier is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to delve into why upper management doesn't "get" IT security threats. The results aren't terribly surprising to those in the trenches, stating that most executives view security as something akin to facilities management. "Thankfully", the $495 report (if you aren't a "Conference Board associate") helps tell you how to handle the situation.

Comments

because our auditors don't get it.

[Shivetya]

Upper management would get it but they send the auditors to talk to middle management who doesn't get it. As such auditors decide that a company needs X because garbage in is garbage out.

Many of the upper management people I talk to know more about what we should be doing compared to what we are doing. The problem they have in overriding the auditors is the threat of the government and the shareholders. If they take the safe route the keep their jobs and stay out of jail. Actually the fear of the government is far worse that fearing the shareholders. (thanks to wonderful overreactions by Congress we get even more doing a whole lotta about nothing that ends up preventing us from doing what we should)

The general problem with IT.

[Kenja]

The general problem with IT work is that if you do your job realy well, nothing happens. So you then have to deal with questions like "why did we spend all that money on y2k when nothing happened".

Its almost worth messing up from time to time just to show what would happen every day if you weren't there.

The approach I keep hearing about

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Don't try to talk ROI. You'll be talking to finance people who will see instantly that there's not enough data about quantitative risks to back up what you're saying.

Instead, calculate the cost of a breach. Then walk up the chain of command with the message "Like any risk, we can avoid it, mitigate it, transfer it to an insurance company, or accept it. If you do nothing you're accepting it. If you accept it then on the day a breach happens you will spend eleventy thousand dollars of company money. Do you have signing authority for eleventy thousand? If yes, here's the cost of a couple of mitigation options, and you're the boss. If no, you understand that I'm only going over your head because the decision has to be made at that level."

Re:Computer people don't "get" business

[The Great Pretender]

I very much agree with ninenine. I'm not IT I'm a major shareholder (which is why I can drink a cup of coffee and read /. mid-morning with no one firing me), on the board and a Principal (interestingly I'm a scientist by training, not marketing or finance). We hire IT people to take care of the IT component, which includes security. They submit a budget, we hack the budget, they complain, but often as not they figure out how to do it. Security came up once and we invited the IT department to tell us the state of affairs. Initially, one IT guy gave a presentation to the address security concerns and what the company needed to do, all that came across in the presentation was unjustified spending. Realizing that we didn't get a satisfactory answer, a couple of months later we asked again and explained why we didn't move forward on the 1st guys proposal. A different IT guy gave a presentation on the same subject and in 5 mins had the money he needed to deal with his concerns. The big difference was that the first guy came in, pulled out the IT ego, techno-baffled us and left us wondering why the hell we should spend the money on something that made no sense to us. The second guy came in and presented a holistic business concept of IT security, used nice simple IT terminology that made sense to us and didn't waste our time showing us how smart he was (we like to think that we hire smart people). We then moved on with running the top end of the business and let IT do their job.

Forget the $495, I'll tell you for free. You want a better chance at the funding, make the upward ladder understand the detrimental effect to the company and their profit if the the security is not in place. That means that you need to find the person in your group who can deliver the message in a nice brief way, using nice simple language that management understands, make sure you have urgency statements in the presentation, but don't be sensationalist, and the selling point is an assessment of the cost impact. The cost of developing security, verses loss of [fill in the blank]. And expect to get the funding in stages, in fact if you present a staged funding plan, it'll probably go down a lot better. Always remember, you don't hold the purse strings and those that do dislike being patronized or being made to look stupid (even though they may be).

Be glad they don't get it

[1369IC]

IT stuff is voodoo to most upper management, and I'm convinced IT shops get away with things they never would if the upper management understood IT as well as they understand, say, supply. I was upper management in two government organizations heavily dependent on IT. As a fairly competent computer user who likes to keep up with current events, I fought with our IT folks endlessly -- at least the management.

The first problem is IT quickly forgets that -- like everybody else except the people actually doing the core functions of the organization -- they are a support organization, not a control organization. They latch on to their ability to throw out security and voodoo computer terms to persuade the upper management to let them set policies. Upper management doesn't understand the policies at all, and often has no choice but to side with the IT pros no matter what the actual users want or need. As often as not, they then set policies that are purely for their convenience (for instance, wanting to standardize on Windows and a strict set of programs even though they support 25 or 30 different sections, some of which have been doing things like digital photography, desktop publishing and design on Macs for years). From the users' perspectives, IT makes using the actual IT resources as painful as possible to make their lives as simple as possible, and the fact that they're hampering actual mission accomplishment doesn't bother them.

Next, they have a sweet deal going where they set a bunch of standards that require certain certifications or skills, so they hire people who perpetuate those standards, and only buy things that are compatible with those standards. This then requires getting on an endless treadmill of more training, more personnel, more software, more hardware, etc. And all the while they make it clear that it's lunacy to buy anything that doesn't have vendor support because if it actually breaks they can't be expected to get it going again using only the training, hardware, software and people that they have brow beat management into paying for using money that *every other part of the organization* was crying for and could have put to good use, too.

Lastly, on a day-to-day basis, far too many of them think that, because they're IT, it's their right to be arrogant, socially or organizationally inept, or just plain weird -- and sometimes it's a combination, so you get a organizationally inept weird guy being arrogant. How many of those does it take to ruin a shop's reputation? (IT certainly has no corner on that market, I'll grant you).

I could go on here, but I'm sure I've pissed off enough people already. I came from the internal communications side of things -- journalism and later PR. In my field management always thinks they can do your job better than you can because, hey, it's just writing and talking. Eventually, I got promoted into management and in dealing with IT I saw that their best defense is that almost nobody in a position of leadership (being mostly older guys, half of whom had never launched a program that wasn't sold by Microsoft) understood what they hell IT did or what it took to get it done. So all it took was a good talker or somebody who learned to cite vague security mandates from higher headquarters to get much more of what they wanted than anybody else did.

Of course, it also left IT open to being weaker when their leadership was weaker (or less smooth). But I didn't run into that. I ran into IT shops that got more of their resource requests approved than anybody else, but didn't really realize it and kept whining for more even though their support curiously never got better no matter how much you spent on them. And for every new capability you read about on Slashdot, they came up with two new security policies that made using it impossible.

Now I'm back in the trenches and don't get to go to the meetings where the IT guys try to talk the boss into banning the USB drives everybody has taken to using because the e-mail

Shouldn't do that, either.

[Kadin2048]

How is that any different from getting a grant to write a book?

Sounds like a damn fine reason not to give people grants to write books then, unless they want to do so as U.S. Government employees, and allow the book to be a product of the United States Government (with their name on it, of course), and therefore in the Public Domain.

If public money is being used to fund the creation of something, the end product of that creation ought to be freely available to the public.

Do you think people would be quite so keen on funding the Smithsonian Institutions, if they charged admission fees? Probably not. I don't have any problem with the Smithsonian being publicly funded, in fact I think it's great; but making things halfway-publicly funded is just crappy, and generally gets the taxpayer less "bang for their buck" than if they just went all-in on half the number of projects, but funded them completely and 'owned' the results for the public, therefore making them free for anyone to enjoy.