Embrace Your Inner Risk Adviser

If you're a security professional who's regularly telling IT and the business side what they're doing wrong with security, then you're doing it wrong.

That's what John Pironti, president of IP Architects LLC, told attendees at Interop New York last week. "They have no incentive to spend time with you if you [only] tell them what they are doing wrong," he said. Security pros should serve as risk advisers to the company, he said.

"As security people, we are better at talking about threats and vulnerabilities than we are about risk," Pironti said. But it's time to shift that mind-set, he said, and to embrace the security risk profile approach.

"We need to differentiate between risk and security: Risk is part of enterprise risk management, and security is the enabler," he said. That will help remove the "friction" that often comes between security and IT, he said, where the security pro is all about protection, and the IT pro is all about availability and efficiency.

First, you must discern the organization's risk "appetite," he said. Drill down on what they care most about and why. Security is the "output," risk defines where you are going, and security determines how, he said.

If you don't know what the organization's key business processes are, he said, then take a look at the business continuity disaster recovery plan.

A risk profile entails deciding and agreeing on what's acceptable risk, and classifying data (public or confidential, for example). "What's the material business impact? That's different for every organization -- some do it by revenue or reputation or regulatory," Pironti said. "When does [a security incident] become material?"

A security incident may not be "material" to a business if it only resulted in a few lost data records, for example. "The cost to protect the data should not exceed the value of the data," Pironti said.

When security helps facilitate a risk profile, it then fits with "the enterprise conversation," he said.

Ensure the business side physically signs off on the risk profile, too, Pironti said. "If you want this thing to work, leadership has to buy in ...They have to understand we are not making decisions for them any longer. We are empowering them."

"No longer are we the people they don't want to see ... now they're asking us questions," he said.

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