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The Business Justification for Data Security- Version 1.0

Rich February 6, 2009 2 Comments

We’ve been teasing you with previews, but rather than handing out more bits and pieces, we are excited to release the complete version of the Business Justification for Data Security. This is version 1.0 of the report, and we expect it to continue to evolve as we get more public feedback. Based on some of that initial feedback, we’d like to emphasize something before you dig in. Keep in mind that this is a business justification tool, designed to help you align potential data security investments with business needs, and to document the justification to make a case with those holding the purse strings. It’s not meant to be a complete risk assessment model, although it does share many traits with risk management tools. We’ve also designed this to be both pragmatic and flexible- you shouldn’t need to spend months with consultants to build your business justification. For some projects, you might complete it in an hour. For others, maybe a few days or weeks as you wrangle business unit heads together to force them to help value different types of information. For those of you that don’t want to read a 38 page paper we’re going to continue to post the guts of the model as blog posts, and we also plan on blogging additional content, such as more examples and use cases. We’d like to especially thank our exclusive sponsor, McAfee, who also set up a landing page here with some of their own additional whitepapers and content. As usual, we developed the content completely independently, and it’s only thanks to our sponsors that we can release it for free (and still feed our families). This paper is also released in cooperation with the SANS Institute, will be available in the SANS Reading Room, and we will be delivering a SANS webcast on the topic on March 17th. This was one of our toughest projects, and we’re excited to finally get it out there. Please post your feedback in the comments, and we will be crediting reviewers that advance the model when we release the next version. And once again, thanks to McAfee, SANS, and (as usual) Chris Pepper, our fearless editor. Share:

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