What business you are actually in?

Do you want to be perceived, and perhaps more importantly, do you want to operate, as the carrot or the stick? In other words, do you want to play the role of the enforcer or the motivator/enabler? All too often our profession seems to lean towards that of the enforcer. Or, in many cases, more like a first responder. We have historically been very reactive in our approach to managing security. As a matter of fact, we have built entire product  areas on managing event streams for purely reactionary purposes (like the IDS and SIEM markets).

While these are worthwhile monitoring concepts and shouldn’t be ignored, there is a vast ocean of untapped opportunity around a more consultative and proactive approach.

Who are your customers?

Just like a start-up, you need to identify who in your organization (and in some cases, those beyond your organization) are your customers. Don’t forget to include those parties that you only see occasionally, such as external auditors, and possibly even suppliers or other business partners. Your information can be a valuable part of their engagement with your organization as well.

This is a critical component to deciding the next step, which is what services and products (i.e.; packaged information for decision support you are offering and how best to ensure that it is useful to the recipients.

Choosing your product and service mix.

Now that you have decided who would be consuming your value-added information, it’s time to identify what makes up your product and service portfolio. The best place to start is to look at the controls spreadsheet that your internal and external auditors use to track the control objectives and activities they are responsible for testing.

While it isn’t a comprehensive set of controls for your security program, it is the minimum set of functions that you should look at for building out your business model. It also comes “pre-loaded’ with a target market and allows you to start building a rapport with the consumers of the information you are providing so that you can make sure that you package it correctly and deliver it in a manner that makes it easier for them to use.

Here is the slide deck that accompanies this portion of the Competitive Compliance curriculum we have developed. Feel free to spread the link around, or even download the PDF of the deck if you find it useful. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. Not just on how this site can be improved, but also what other content or ideas you’d like to see in the curriculum or content on this site.

The post Creating the Security Business appeared first on The Business Model of Security.

Tom understands what makes people tick, and more importantly how they can tap into that energy and change how they are perceived and valued within their organizations. By drawing parallels between our daily grind as white collar professionals and the work of “traditional” professional services firms such as those in advertising, legal, accounting, and other disciplines, he weaves together a model that each of us can use to great advantage in our day-to-day work.

If we choose to.

Tom’s fundamental understanding of the PSF boils down to three simple axioms. Here they are, in his own words:

The Professional Service Firms. “PSFs,” as I call them, sell one and only one thing: Creative Intellectual Capital.

PSFs depend on one and only one thing: Superb Client Relationships.

The PSF bedrock consists of one and only one thing: Superior, Animated, Creative TALENT … dedicated to…EXCELLENCE.

As security practitioners, we have been stellar at understanding and trumpeting the first point, often to our very own discredit. You see, we tend to imbue the information security universe with a certain mystique, an air of the supernatural.

Unfortunately, it has backfired, and something fierce.

In creating this atmosphere of complexity and high-tech mumbo-jumbo, we have alienated our stakeholders, the very people we are supposed to be educating and working with to manage risk. Perhaps it’s our IT backgrounds, or the glut of TLAs (three letter acronyms) in our field that have built this Tower of Babel. The root cause is irrelevant; the end result has stayed the same. We have destroyed Tom’s second point, often before we even realized it. Our “client” relationships are in shambles. We don’t have a seat at the big table. We aren’t taken as seriously as we would like, or feel that we deserve to be.

And despite our focus on Tom’ s third point, the fresh and exuberant talent we bring in gets poisoned by our own jaded worldview. We are destroying the future of our profession, one new hire at a time.

Thankfully, this trend can be reversed. All it takes is a fresh look at how our operations are run, and how we choose to measure our success.

You can just click here to jump to Amazon and pick up a copy of Tom’s book, “The Professional Services Firm 50“.

If you’re the impatient type, and just want the highlights, then click the button below to download “PSFs Are Everything”, the e-book he has been gracious enough to allow us to redistribute.

Get Tom’s Paper

The post Information Security as a PSF appeared first on The Business Model of Security.