(Slightly) More Organizations Proactively Managing Security Efforts

Security vendor survey at the RSA Conference 2011 shows more organizations planning and coordinating their security efforts across security and IT operations teams and risk management groups. But don't plan on a party and fireworks celebration just yet - the improvements are minor.According to security vendor SenSage's recent and not so pithily titled The State of Security Information and Event Management Processes: A Survey of Security Professionals' Attitudes About Security Operations, Measurement and Data Analysis report, small steps in the right direction are being made. For instance, in 2010 about 42 percent of those surveyed at least planned and documented process coordination among IT operations, security operations, and risk managers, and a good portion of those actually measured the amount of process coordination in place. In their 2011 survey, that number jumped to 47 percent.

However, for you glass half-empty folks - that still means 53 percent range from no coordination to "reactive triage across teams." However, a year ago that number was an even worse 58 percent.

Of course, trying to hype the need for its technology, SenSage is hyping the relatively poor state of most enterprises' ability to measure security effectiveness.

However, the data does show an improvement, year over year. And it's a dramatic improvement from a few years ago when even reactive triage among these teams was a pipe dream in many companies. These stakeholders weren't even talking. At least now they are.

And there's more discussion among security managers around metrics and the ability to measure and improve security processes than ever before. It's good to see the security profession start to take these steps and grow up. There's much more work to do, of course, as the results from the survey below show, but at least the industry is heading in the right direction:

• Sixty-five percent of enterprises say that they have no measurement to benchmark the effectiveness of these processes, or that this measurement is inconsistent.

• More than a third (34 percent) of respondents said that they have no proactive efforts in place to improve the five processes, or that their improvement efforts have been inconsistent.

• As a result of this absence of coordination, measurement, and proactivity, most organizations (57 percent) perceive these five core areas of security management to be ineffective or "somewhat effective" at best.

Where is your organization? Are your operations and security teams working together? Is your organization mature enough now to be measuring your progress? We'd be interested in hearing about your experience.

For my security and technology observations throughout the day, you can find me on Twitter @georgevhulme.