"Security talent, especially senior talent, is very hard to find," Nather says. "Unfortunately, a lot of organizations are in the position of competing with security vendors for that talent."

• I think he meant to say that "...organizations are [not] in the position of competing with the security vendors..." I don't necessarily agree with that especially with the overseas talent coming to America and the existing talent matriculating from all of the various major institutions, schools need to offer more classes from a security standpoint and teachers need to put students in virtual security scenarios where the environment is a virtual synthetic setup (they experience a major hack).

Even outsourcing has its limitations, Nather points out. "There won't be anything you can completely outsource because your outsourcer will come back to you and say, 'we don't know what this means,' and 'we need to talk to someone internally who can take care of this.'"

•  I do agree with that, we won't be able to address every scenario and outcome, however, we can address 90% of them by ensuring the training and talent we have in office are all working togetehr and on the same page (communication), remove the office politics (this needs to come from the top-down) and we as individuals within organization need to take it upon themselves to learn and train while away from the office, that needs to be something that is engrained in the person you hire (continuous learning).

"If we as professionals can't agree on what organizations need, how are they supposed to know?" Nather asks. When you don't know the risks you're trying to manage, it's tough to come up with a specific shopping list. Businesses may need to conduct extensive research and perform a security audit to determine exactly what they need and can afford.

•  I agree with this statement, but executives try to make decision based on what they know or don't know and the friends they have in the market (kickbacks), that needs to be removed. There needs to be a test environment where decisions are made based on the performance of the solution and create a viable application research strategy, identify price and market acceptance (a forum where ideas can be exchanged). Cisco is not the only player, employees need to be open to trying different technologies, train and constant test those solutions (R&D team). Remove the age of adage that individuals are trying to save their job by using something they know, remove that mentality.

"It's not that they're incapable, but they have constraints in that environment they might not be able to get around," she says. An airplane manufacturer has influence, Nather continues, but new technology will have to be carefully tested, in one airplane at a time, before it's rolled out. In the public sector, it's difficult to justify upgrading equipment when everything works fine. Public sector technology is designed to maximize taxpayer's dollars, not keep up with security.

•  Yes, Scada environments have the same thing, but as mentioned earlier, if a test environment was set up, replicate (small version) and determine if the security solution affects how the application performs (place network monitoring tools around and in the application), the user can then determine if the tests affect how the application allowing team members to make any adjustments to alleviate the problems found (consistent and continual testing, ensure the environment is like the one in production, work with the vendors to help resolve the issue).

The percentage of those depending on external resources could be admitting there is a limit to how much an organization can know about security, she explains. After all, a business with the expertise to know what it needs to do for security may not have the talent to execute on it. Many companies outsource responsibilities that are hard to hire for, and hard to sustain with skilled workers: security operations monitoring is one example; incident response is another.

• Look at the big picture, the security team should be an investment (protecting resources), the market for those resources increase, then there should be resources allocated to keep that talent on-site, the NBA, NFL, Hockey and others do it, the security teams are no different.