A chance encounter with Texas’s beloved company’s Chief Human resources officers tempted me to ask a candid question. The question was a question that lots of sales engineers will be asking when they attempt to sell a technology product to an organization.
The question from a Sales Engineer typically is: “What is one of the most important requirements for adding a technology into your environment?”
The answer from the Chief Human resource officer was “It doesn’t waste my resources.”
That usually translates into time, people, and money in layman’s terms. People, process, and technology in CISO terms. The reason for resource sensitivity is that scarce resources have alternative uses A more correct answer from business strategy could be “Don’t let the organization get sidetracked with core business functionality”. i.e. let the organization execute its business strategy. While executing strategy, the organization shouldn’t be distracted by wasting resources on technology if it impedes business continuity.
You might be wondering why I am stating the obvious. The reason is, that SecureIQLab is releasing a comprehensive report on Advanced Cloud Firewall (ACFW) that highlights operational efficiency, security resiliency, and security efficacy; as well as providing the implementation and validation process of these tests.
When we look at firewalls, few things seem to be constant now. Here are some areas that are constant in ACFW.
- Deployment
- Tuning
- Policy management
All of these seem straightforward and table stakes, but ask a network administrator, or IT administrator how much fun it is to do those 3 parts of the continuous validation. What sort of resources will be used when those 3 steps happen?
Those uses of resources will surely impact the organization’s efficiency in all sorts of ways.
So, I guess, I converted that chance encounter conversation into some metrics that are going to be valuable to folks who make resource allocations inside an organization. Enough of business administration.
The next question that most of the computing machinery security folks will be asking is what about security?
Security seems to be a commodity that is traded in the marketplace. That in turn leads to the assignment of the price. The price fluctuates on some factors. I am not an economist by trade, but it appears to me that a wise guy named Adam Smith put together a theory. All prices tend to gravitate towards the natural price for that “commodity”. So, security, if traded in a marketplace, will tend to gravitate toward the natural price.
Why does the price matter? Well, from the above resources concerns it looks like spending resources in the form of price is a resource drain “if “that cost is not making business more operationally efficient.
So, if security in some appropriate areas such as small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), is affordable to consumers (consumers of tech), then it becomes a pursuable commodity in the marketplace with a goal that each party can maximize their satisfaction (Keynesian economics). If that security also provides good protection against some likely attack scenarios and speaks to resource management from an organizational perspective, then I am sure I have done my job to answer the question and help people make that decision, from a seller to the buyer perspective and an analyst to a researcher perspective as well.
Tangentially enough, the effect of the assessment is that we crammed together empirical data and reasonable metrics to understand if technology implementation and usage is a resource drain. If you were living in the 18th century and interested in epistemology, that sounds like an enlightening argument between empiricists (Locke, Barkley, Hume) and continental rationalists (De-cartes, Leibnitz). As some of you might know, that enlightening argument was supposedly put to bed by one particular Immanuel Kant via a critique of pure reason.
In other words, the ACFW comparative report has the pragmatic data and metrics to make a sound technological assessment.
We might well convert the result into a ChatGPT bot that disentangles Kant’s resolution in a manner of Shakespearean play.
