IT business leaders in Australia are responsible for ensuring success across a wide project and BAU landscape.
Globally, cyber security projects are on the rise with businesses scrambling to secure their technical environments from a growing number of cyber threats.
There are a number of common mistakes that can cause cyber security projects to fail.
The team at Loop Secure have documented some common reasons for cyber security project failure and how to remediate these:
- Lack of Executive Buy-in and Awareness
A common mistake when initially preparing a security project or program is failing to raise the idea internally and communicate expectations.
Security professionals will not be successful if they operate in a bubble.
If the security program is not aligned to business objectives and expectations are not clearly set, it can be troublesome to achieve the desired budget, resources and timeframes.
In order to obtain executive buy-in and company adoption, technical business leaders and security staff need to work with both the business and technical teams to understand business critical goals and communicate how their security initiatives both fit within and support them.
- Project Organisation and Resource Planning
After the business has agreed to the security program, the next common area of failure is in the organisation and resource planning stage.
In a busy project environment, resources across the business are pulled in multiple directions.
It is critical for technical business leaders and information security leaders to communicate their vision to the project team, ensure resources are allocated across sprints or backlogs and watch that project scope is managed tightly by project managers.
As a technical business leader or security specialist, you will need to review the key deliverables and project milestones to ensure scope is controlled and the project does not blow out.
- Tight Cyber Security Project Budgets
Security projects will frequently compete with other IT projects that are designed to increase revenue or performance.
Therefore, it is always challenging to secure the right amount of budget for a service that protects the business and may not be seen as a direct contributor to increased revenue or performance.
Without proper financial support, security projects frequently fall just short of implementation. Often they are put on hold until more funding can be found from other capex budgets.
To gain the right budget, the team at Loop recommend calculating your security project Return on Investment and present these findings to the Leadership Team during funding rounds.
To calculate your ROI, we have developed a whitepaper to help you manage your budgets and ROI.
- Lack of Skilled Human Capital
With a growing landscape of digital, application, infrastructure and enterprise wide cyber threats emerging, there is a shortage of skilled cyber security staff to execute technical components of projects.
Frequently, an internal security team or team member may lack the knowledge or are untrained in the scope of the project, or the technology being implemented.
Knowledge gaps need to be addressed prior to project commencement to assess whether external support, training and experience needs to be brought in.
If your project has reached this point, you may need to assess a large list of external vendors who may be able to help with specific governance, implementation or risk management tasks.
We recommend reading our “Choosing the Right Cyber Security Vendor” whitepaper.
- Overlapping or Inadequate Cyber Security Technology
With thousands of different cyber security technologies in the market, it is difficult to choose which technology best suits your needs, what fits into your current environment and what is going to fix your business security problem.
Another facet is that many technologies overlap with features, and frequently cyber security project budgets blow out when many expensive technologies can be accommodated by one platform only.
A thorough analysis of technologies and solutions needs to be conducted before choosing the right technology.
Some example questions to ask your vendor include;
- How do you implement the technology?
- What sort of support do you offer?
- Do you have case studies or reference clients?
- Do you offer certifications, onboarding and training?
- How does your product differentiate from competitors?
- Which operating systems and platforms does it run on?
- Does your product run on physical or virtual systems?
- Does it run on premise or in the cloud? If in the cloud, what security certification does your platform have?
- What SLA agreements do you have for troubleshooting support?
Remembering that many cyber security projects fail due to lack of planning and training, asking these important questions of your vendor prior to purchase can help with future problems.
For an in-depth guide on how to choose the right vendor, download our whitepaper.
To learn how to manage, prioritise and calculate the ROI on your cyber security budget and projects, download our whitepaper here
