· … someone asks about your weekend plans and your answer consists of a list of Pri ones, twos, and threes.

· … you’ve ever ended a relationship using a PowerPoint presentation."

(more)

IDC also found that although 80 percent of CEOs believe their security teams are being held formally accountable for their contributions to business growth and innovation, only 44 percent of security leaders believe they are being measured on their contributions to innovation. This finding points to a surprising lack of alignment between the expectations of C-level management and the priorities of security professionals...

Good Day To You My Friend. 

It is understandable that you might be a little bit apprehensive because you do not know me but I have a lucrative business proposal of mutual interest to share with you. I got your reference in my search for someone who suits my proposed business relationship. 

I am 54 years old and happily married with children, and I have an obscured business suggestion for you. I will need you to assist me in executing a business project from Hong Kong to your country. It involves the transfer of a large sum of money. Everything concerning this transaction shall be legally done without hitch. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in all matters concerning this issue. 

Once the funds have been successfully transferred into your account, we shall share in the ratio to be agreed by both of us. 

I will prefer you reach me on my private email address below (xxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com.hk) and finally after that I shall furnish you with more information's about this operation. Should you be interested, please forward the following to me urgently: 

1. Full names 
2. Occupation 
3. Private phone number 
4. Current contact address 

Please if you are not interested delete this email and do not hunt me because I am putting my career and the life of my family at stake with this venture. Although nothing ventured is nothing gained. 

Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated. 

Kind Regards, 

Ben S. Bernanke

Traveling towards VMworld 2008

I, along with thousands of others, wended my way through a vast dimly lit cavern of a place helped along by the strangely surreal sight of ushers in black waving wispy red flags to guide us not to the empty seats in front of us, but to the ones 50 yards on. (Ah Vegas, my feet hurt already.) Perhaps the point was to live in the moment, soak in the pre-rock concert atmosphere complete with a hip and cool soundtrack ripped off from Apple commercials. (Do they all use the same ad firm?) A better way to build the anticipation for, yes, the kickoff keynote session at VMworld 2008. (photo credit: lodev)

To the sounds of Hey Ya (Shake it like a Polaroid picture), we shifted forward in our uncomfortable temporary seating placed, as at all tech conferences, too close for all but the skinny girls. The moment was here – one of those videos started playing on the dozen or so huge monitors floating above the convention crowd. You know this video; you’ve probably seen it before from HP or someone like that. One of those videos with instrumental Coldplay music in the background with time lapse/speeded-up video of people in motion and floating captions dropping into the images that leave you with a slight smile on your face as you “get” the relationship between image and text. (Do they all use the same ad firm?)

And here he is, announced like a Vegas headliner, Paul Maritz, the new CEO of VMware. Hmm. After all that hype, I rather expected someone in a black turtleneck and jeans to come out. Instead here’s this guy with pleat-front pants and an admittedly cool accent (New Zealand?) who looks a little like Al from Home Improvement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – everyone likes Al.

And then the real fun begins.

• 30 years ago, Paul Maritz started off his business career as a developer
• 10 years ago, VMware was founded by Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum (BTW, 10 seconds spent showing a slide with cartoon-ized images of the founders, “thanks for what you did for the company for the past 10 years”. 10 seconds after 10 years…but maybe more would have been hypocritical…)
• a retrospective of centralized vs. decentralized computing initiatives from the 1960’s to today
• of course VMware milestones from 1998 to today
• and then an analyst-ready diagram showing the product roadmap (to be delivered in 2009) with, you guessed it, finally a connection between VMware and cloud computing (remember Maritz’s cloud-computing company was bought by EMC just a couple of years ago and that’s the section he headed up at EMC before being brought into VMware).

Forward Looking

2008 (and probably much of 2009) will be a very busy year for VMware. If you believe the roadmap, VMware seems to be taking on the management of everything – from chargeback and capacity planning to virtual storage and virtual networking (more to come on just what the planned vStorage and vNetwork will deliver) – but all of it VMware-centric. As we said in an earlier post, they’ve moved away from “defending” the hypervisor business proposition to focusing on management services on top of their own hypervisor platform. Revenue pressures must be excruciating – who wants to be a public company these days?

The best part of that new “Virtual Data Center Operating System” diagram/roadmap was the addition (and I mean addition) of something called Cloud vServices. (Did anyone else find it odd that Cloud vServices is kind of on its own in the Infrastructure vServices area? AND, I’ll have to get the other version of the diagram/roadmap I actually saw at the show because that one shows an inexplicable 4^th box in the Application vServices area titled “…”. Really. Maybe to balance out the addition of Cloud vServices?)

What was clear is that the move from VirtualCenter to vCenter –and the new vServices for rolled-up management of virtualization components/capability to span multiple VirtualCenters (or future vCenters) for reporting, monitoring and management at scale – has been in the works for a bit (but in tech time, that could mean 6 months), but the cloud stuff…not so much.

Beyond the very high-level speak appropriate to a keynote (100+ service provider partners for off-premise cloud…suspended VM’s that you don’t have to pay for until you need it), the details are uber-fuzzy. There was a session that Dave went to which was supposed to shed more light, but when questions were asked about how it really works, the answers seemed to be TBD. Does anyone know more? If VMware really has figured out practical cloud computing for enterprises, kudos to them. But I fear they’re like everyone else (except maybe AT&T) and are still working out the details.

I say today is a good day for two reasons:  1.)  BT’s CSO Jill Knesek wrote an article called “Keys to establishing an end-to-end security strategy” which begs some discussion within context, and 2.)  Sara Peters on Twitter last night wanted to know why I thought “risk management” requires more than what most “best practices” around the subject suggest the effort requires.

WHAT SHOULD WE BE REFLECTING ABOUT?

Jill Knesek’s article gives us a rough outline of how to develop a security strategy.  It’s fairly high-level, Pragmatic CSO-ish type stuff.  It gives us a nice outline of

• Get a seat at the table
• Process
• People
• Technology

Nothing earth-shattering there.  But it is a very nice broad CISO-level taxonomy about what we have to reflect on.  The need to reflect is driven by something Jack told me long ago,

“The amount of risk we have is a function of the decisions we made and our ability to execute on them from some point in the past”.

As an Aside:  So Sarah if you’re reading, this quote does much to explain why I said I disagree with much of what our industry calls “risk management”.  We tend to define the process of risk management as essentially a tactical “issue whack-a-mole” exercise. Find the issue.  Analyze the “risk” around the issue.  Fix the issue.  Repeat. This hamster-wheel-of-pain, while sometimes an effective tool for the CISO, is incongruous with addressing root causes (the ability to match a tactical issue to the strategic shortcoming that created the issue is up to the expertise of the analyst or consultant).  It is only Kaizen without (good) Hansei, if you will.

Back to what Jill is writing - the sorts of things we should be reflecting about can be thought of in context of her outline.  Namely:

1. Once you have a seat at the table, what is the nature of that relationship?  Who are you reporting to and what are their concerns? What and how are you reporting and how might that be addressing their concerns?
2. What processes are in place?, How do you know that those are the processes that should be in place? If they are, what kind of job am I doing at those processes?
3. What is the quality of the skills and resources I have from a people perspective, and how do I know if they are adequate?  How do I know that the training they petition me for will effectively reduce organizational risk?
4. Are the Technology solutions I have in place effective, are we managing them effectively, and what sort of States of Knowledge could they provide me with (to make good decisions and execute upon them, from above)?

This, for the CISO, is Hansei.  The continuous management of it is Kaizen.  Not to particularly pick on Jill’s article, but creating a “risk register expressed in ALE” might be fine if you’re trying to explain to the board what your “first 100 days in office” will be like - but these sorts of lists are usually not very strategic in nature, and as such, depending on the outcome of that risk register (and the models used to create it) it might not actually be useful.

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR REFLECTION?

So what is needed for this sort of CISO-level Hansei?

The CISO must understand the

• Current State of Nature

turn that into a

• State of Knowledge

and use that to create a

• State of Wisdom.

CREATING A STATE OF NATURE FOR THE IRM PROGRAM

This Current State of Nature determination be done by applying analytical methods to a program audit.  We must understand questions like,  “What is in that program and how is it structured?”  before we can answer questions about “how (good/bad) are we at managing risk?”

There are many ways to structure an IRM program, but as an example - below is a graphic shared with me by Adrian Seccombe.  For those who know Adrian and the Trust Model - this is classified as “white” so it’s OK for public display and consumption.  But here’s what Adrian is trying to build at a high level:

So regarding Adrian’s program diagram:

1. Is a governance framework.  Think ITIL.
2. Is a risk framework.  Think ISO 27002 using FAIR as an analytical engine.  To be fair (pun) I believe this is really issue management, and it’s a process, but that’s OK.
3. Reg compliance should be self explanatory.  That’s essentially what GRC products do for you.
4. With architecture, I think Adrian is inclined towards TOGAF.
5. Security is the ISMS in place (27001, ISM^3, PCI, whatever…)
6. Are the processes that drive execution
7. Monitor (audit) is creating a State of Nature and Evaluate is creating a State of Knowledge from that State of Nature around items 1-6.

EVALUATE - CREATING A STATE OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE IRM PROGRAM

That evaluate is Hansei/Kaizen.  Evaluation, done effectively, will drive actual organizational risk exposure.  Evaluate will even answer those four questions we raised in the “What Should We Be Reflecting About” section above:

1. Once you have a seat at the table, what is the nature of that relationship?  Who are you reporting to and what are their concerns? What and how are you reporting and how might that be addressing their concerns?
2. What processes are in place?, How do you know that those are the processes that should be in place? If they are, what kind of job am I doing at those processes?
3. What is the quality of the skills and resources I have from a people perspective, and how do I know if they are adequate?
4. Are the Technology solutions I have in place effective, are we managing them effectively, and what sort of States of Wisdom do they provide me with (to make good decisions and execute upon them, from above)?

If we could have a nice metric (or set of metrics) that answers these questions, we might call it something like “My Ability To Manage Risk” or MATMR for short.

GETTING TO A STATE OF WISDOM

What’s then missing is how you create a State of Wisdom around the State of Knowledge developed - your “MATMR” metric.  That is, given the current State of Knowledge - how can I be most effective?  This State of Wisdom requires proper models for what risk is, and what you can do to manage it applied in a probabilistic manner (because we can’t intrinsically *know* the future, we can only say with some degree of certainty what the desired course should be).

So the outcome of Hansei/Kaizen should be to create a State of Wisdom about Risk Management.  This is why reflection must be relentless - because your wisdom must be similarly abundant.

This is no small part of the reason RMI exists, why we build software and help organizations understand the things they do.