un-earthed

I was chatting with a friend last week and he seemed bamboozled by outsourcing, managed security services and opex only cloud based security concept. He said to me “Why would anyone want to become detached from their information security?… it just does not make sense.” I could have talked about security practices, allocation of resources, skills, operational expenditure and many other benefits until I was blue in the face without so much as a nod of understanding so I needed to come up with an suitable analogy rather quickly.

Then it hit me – use the fine dining analogy. This is what I then explained:

Think about the different ways you could enjoy roast beef and potatoes with freshly baked crusty bread and soft whipped butter and a nice drop of red wine to go with it.

If you wanted to take care of everything yourself, you could grow the wheat and make the bread, you could milk the cow and churn the milk to butter, slaughter a cow, dig up the potatoes and other vegetables from the garden, pick the grapes, ferment the grapes and make the wine, prepare the food and then cook the food. Some organisations like the do it yourself approach and will design, procure, implement, operate and maintain information security in house. When trying to establish costs you would need to add up the costs of land for planting the wheat, fruit and vegetables and for keeping cattle, keeping the wheat, fruit and vegetables alive, feeding the cattle, making the wine, and cooking the meal

Most of us will happily cook a meal, but we will rely on outsourced services such as bakeries, butchers and green grocers for fresh vegetable produce. Managed Security Services are just that – an organisation will supply the technology and leave the operation and maintenance to a managed security service provider. Now the costs are reduced to procuring each of the food items and a bottle of wine and then cooking.

Now, what if we instead decided to outsource it all and move to a cloud based security offering? In this case we would just find the quickest path to our local restaurant, place an order for the roast beef and either a glass or bottle of wine. Cloud based security is just that – all you need to do is provide a path to the cloud and the rest is done for you. For this solution to our fine roast beef meal we pay purely on an opex basis; in other words we pay a single bill which covers somebody else doing the procuring, cooking, and better yet, washing up the dishes. At a quick glance you may say that the cost of going to a restaurant would be more expensive than cooking at home, however, when you add up the costs of procurement, preparation, cooking and cleaning, you may very well find than an opex, cloud based solution is cheaper. Keep in mind also that if you don’t really have the skills to cook roast beef, then your restaurant will provide a much better experience. That is their core business after all.

Suddenly it all made sense to my friend. On that note, I felt my work was done, but I did have cravings for a nice roast beef meal.