Information Security and Innovation: often at two different ends of an executive team’s business strategy. The non-CIO ‘C’ level folks want to discuss revenue generation, efficiency and growth. Three areas often immeasurably enhanced by having a strong and clear innovation management framework. The CIO’s objectives are often focused on technical delivery, compliance, uploading SLA’s and more recently on privacy enablement and data breach prevention. So how can the two worlds combine, to create a perfect storm for trusted and secure economic growth?
Innovation Management
But firstly how do organisations actually become innovative? It is a buzzword that is thrown around at will, but many organisations fail to build out the necessary teams and processes to allow innovation to succeed. Innovation basically focuses on the ability to create both incremental and radically different products, processes and services, with the aim of developing net-new revenue streams. But can this process be managed?
Or are companies and individuals just “born” to be creative? Well simply, no. Creativity can be managed, fostered and encouraged. Some basic creative thinking concepts, include “design thinking” – where the focus is on emphasising customer needs, prototyping, iterating and testing again. This is then combined with different thinking types – both open (problem felt directly), closed (via a 3rd party), internal (a value add contribution) and external (creativity as part of a job role). The “idea-factory” can then be categorised into something like HR lead ideas – those from existing staff that lead to incremental changes – R&D ideas – the generation of radical concepts that lead to entirely new products – and finally Marketing lead ideas – those that capture customer feedback.
Business Management
Once the idea-machine has been designed, it needs feeding with business strategy. That “food” helps to define what the idea-machine should focus upon and prioritise. This can be articulated in the form of what the business wants to achieve. If it is revenue maximisation, does this take the form of product standardisation, volume or distribution changes? This business analysis needs to look for identifying unmet customer needs, tied neatly into industry or global trends (a nice review on the latter is the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab).
Information Security Management
There is a great quote by Amit & Zott, that goes along the lines of, as an organisation, you’re always one innovation from being wiped out. Very true. But that analogy can also be applied to “one data breach” from being wiped out – from irreparable brand damage, or perhaps via the theft of intellectual property. So how can we accelerate from the focus of business change and forward thinking to information security, which has typically been retrospective, restrictive and seen as a IT cost centre.
Well there are similarities believe it or not and, when designed in the right way the overlay of application, data and identity lead security can drive faster, more efficient and more trust worthy services. One of the common misconceptions regarding security management and implementation, is that it is applied retrospectively. An application or infrastructure is created, then audits, penetration tests or code analysis takes place. Security vulnerabilities are identified, triaged and fixed in future releases.
Move Security to the Left
It is much more cost effective and secure, to apply security processes at the very beginning of any project. Be it for the creation of net-new applications or a new infrastructure design. The classic “security by design” approach. For example, developers should have basic understanding of security concepts – cryptography 101, when to hash versus encrypt, what algorithms to use, how to protect from unnecessary information disclosure, identity protection and so on. Exit criteria within epic and story creation should reference how the security posture should, as a minimum not be altered. Functional tests should include static and dynamic code analysis. All of these incremental changes really move “security to the left” of the development pipeline, getting closer to the project start than the end.
Agile -v- State Gate Analysis
Within the innovation management framework, stage-gate analysis is often used to triage creative idea processing, helping to identify what to move forward with and what to abandon. A stage is a piece of work, followed by a gate. A gate basically has an exit criteria, with exits such as “kill”, “stop”, “back”, “go forward” etc. Each idea flows through this process to basically kill early and reduce cost. As an idea flows through the stage-gate process, the cost of implementation clearly increases. This approach is very similar to the agile methodology of building complex software. Lots of unknowns. Baby steps, iteration, feedback and behaviour alteration and so on. So there is a definitive mindset duplication between creating ideas that feed into service and application creation and how those applications are made real.
Security Innovation and IP Protection
A key theme of information security attack vectors over the last 5 years, have been the speed of change. Whether we are discussing malware, ransomware, nation state attacks or zero-day notifications, there is constant change. Attack vectors do not stay still. The infosec industry is growing annually as both private sector and nation states ramp defence mechanisms using skilled personnel, machine learning and dedicated practices. Those “external” changes require organisations to respond in innovative and agile ways when it comes to security.
Security is no longer a compliance exercise. The ability to deliver a secure and trusted application or service is a competitive differentiator that can build long lasting, sticky customer relationships. A more direct relationship between innovation and information security, is the simple protection of intellectual property that relates to the new practices, ideas, patents and other value that has been created, due to innovative frameworks. That IP needs protecting, from external malicious attacks, disgruntled insiders and so on.
Summary
Overall, organisations are doing through the digital transformation exercise at rapid speed and scale. That transformation process requires smart innovation which should be neatly tied into the business strategy. However, security management is no longer a retrospective compliance driven exercise. The process, personnel and speed of change the infosec industry sees, can provide a great breeding ground for helping to alter the application development process, help to reduce internal boundaries and help to deliver secure, trusted privacy preserving services that can allows organisations to grow.