Retour 
I am often struck by the similarities in the skill set required for both parenting and cybersecurity. With children—as with employees—it is much easier to keep everyone safe if you have a little bit of visibility into what’s actually going on. The hardest child to parent effectively is one who shuts themselves away in their bedroom, operating in isolation and giving no clues as to the risks they may be exposing themselves to. If you respond to this teenager-imposed information blockade by imposing your own hefty limitations on their accesses and freedoms it rarely goes down well (and in all good 90’s TV dramas, it tends to result in the teen climbing out of the window).
Apply this same approach to cybersecurity policy and a team of grown up employees is just as likely to find a metaphorical window to escape through. No one likes heavy handed blocks (and most people find ways around them), but if you don’t know the risks to which employees are exposing corporate data and systems, it is tempting to just lock everything down. Lack of visibility inevitably leads to paranoid and heavy-handed blocking policies, which impact productivity with equal inevitability.
So how on earth do you get your teen to open up? Well, this isn’t the blog for that. At this point, I will dive into the cybersecurity side of this analogy because, while the skills are similar, it’s here that I am more confident in my expertise!
The first thing to consider is exactly what question you want to answer and what insights you need to be able to do this. This is a logical but often forgotten first step before you make any efforts to actually pull the data together. This “question before answer” structure can help address the all-too-real challenge that huge volumes of data can quickly become overwhelming if the collation is undirected.
As an example, raw information on data movement looks like this, and it is unusable:
Now look at the image below. This is a more coherent diagram because it has been focused by asking a question specifically pertaining to “Sensitive data moving to non-corporate locations.” As a result this diagram delivers actionable insights:
So what are we actually talking about when we say “actionable insights?”
Just as a parent is capable of making risk assessments and tweaking rules depending on whether their child is at a sleepover in a home where the parents are well known vs out at a concert in an unfamiliar city, so security policy can look for insightful indicators around data flows, applications in use, data types, and access methods, and then use these to determine organizational risk exposure and design policy.
Which of these would be useful for you to know as you determine your risk exposure and decide which policies should be implemented?
- “Did you know you have 20,000 files/documents with sensitive data moving to WeTransfer and personal instances of GDrive and Box?”
- “Did you know you have 41 different cloud storage apps in use across your organization, but only four of them are ‘managed’ having been through the organization’s required security and procurement checks?”
- “Did you know that 94% of your managed app data traffic flows through the US, even though it originates in Germany, and is ultimately stored in Germany?”
- “Did you know your users have unmet business needs that are currently being hindered by security policies blocking certain actions (e.g. they have justifiable corporate reasons for converting documents to PDF formats)?”</