I guess if you have been around long enough, you have seen everything over and over again. I felt my age today when I saw yet another (lame) attempt to Move Security from a Cost Center to a Brand Differentiator. How many times have we security folks wished for the day we could get project funding because it helped the business either to make more money or to spend less money? Gosh, that would make life a lot easier.
The holy grail has always been to position security as an enabling technology. Unfortunately it just isn’t. The only thing security enables is…uh…nothing. It gets back to assurances, and we security folks can’t make assurances either way. If you spend $X on $widget, maybe it will stop an attack. Maybe it won’t. If you don’t have $widget maybe you won’t even be attacked, so you might as well light a bag of money on fire. It’s like building a house on quicksand.
To be fair, in some cases security is table stakes. For example you expect your private data to be protected. In a many cases you will be disappointed, but we don’t really see organizations positioning security as a differentiator. They make those pronouncements to allay our fears and eliminate an obstacle to purchase – not as a buying catalyst.
But the most offensive part of the article comes later, in a section that at first seemed kind of logical. But this quote from some guy named Alan Wlasuk almost made me fall out of my chair:
“But any company can shine in an industry environment where the majority of their competitors have suffered from confidence destroying security attacks.”
Shine? Really? Your suggestion is that companies tells customers to do business with them because they suck less?? That’s how I read Alan’s statement. I’ll admit I clearly didn’t learn too much as a VP Marketing, but I do know it’s a bad idea to position and build campaigns around attributes with little to no longevity. So we should build our brands on being more secure? Unbreakable much? Thanks to our pals at LiquidMatrix for that little chuckle this morning.
I thump vendors regularly for trying to run campaigns based on competitor breaches. Like when a token vendor (okay – all of them) tried to capitalize on the RSA token breach by positioning their tokens as more secure, whatever that means. Kicking the competition when they are down comes back to haunt you – we all live in glass housees. Sure enough, some of those very vendors had high profile issues with their own certificate authorities. Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?
Take it from someone who has tried to position security as anything but a cost center for close to a decade. It doesn’t work. Your best bet is to realistically show the risk of not doing something, and let business people make their business decisions. And if your marketing folks tell you about this brand spanking new campaign to be launched based on a breach at your competitor, give them my number. I have a clue bat for them.
Photo credit: “VISI Black Hat” originally uploaded by delta407
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