Streamlining Your InfoSec Company’s Workload: How Standardization Makes You Smarter and More Responsive

Streamlining Your InfoSec Company’s Workload: How Standardization Makes You Smarter and More Responsive

So far in our series of articles on InfoSec business improvement, we’ve talked a lot about the benefits of setting up processes. Established processes, like having defined and regularly updated methodologies, improve the consistency and accuracy of your tests; this benefits your clients and, as a result, your company.

And we know we’re probably preaching to the choir a bit on this one. Most owners and managers would agree that having set methodologies in place is ideal. The problem comes in implementation: getting people to follow the established procedures all the time, every time.

Process improvement can be especially difficult at InfoSec companies. This is often for cultural reasons. One major obstacle is the hacker ethos, which places a high valuation on creativity and spontaneity. For many pentest professionals, the mere idea of processes and procedures can be a killjoy. Standardization is not, on the surface, fun or exciting.

But what is often not understood is that process standardization actually leads to more opportunities to be creative, not fewer. In this article, we’ll talk about:

—The reasons why standardization fosters creativity—Other cultural obstacles you may be facing that

impede standardization—Some steps you can take to start shifting your

company culture towards acceptance of standardization

Why Standardization Increases Creative Opportunities

Why does putting standards in place lead to more creativity?

To make a long story short:

1. Standardization reduces time spent on oft-repeated tasks that you already consider correct (e.g.; your up-to-date methodologies and procedures that don’t need to be reinvented).

2. By saving time on those oft-repeated tasks, there’s more time left to work creatively on the problem at hand.

Let’s imagine a craftsman who makes wooden chairs by hand. The craftsman has a process he follows. He selects the wood a certain way, he cuts the wood a certain way, he assembles the pieces using established, proven techniques.

It’s only towards the end of his process that he adds the details that are most outwardly creative and that have the most in common with art: ornamental carvings and designs, maybe some painting.

The main bulk of his work, though, is a set process that he follows. The more efficient he makes his fundamental process, the more time he has to dedicate to the more creative elements.

This is a bit similar to pentesting. Pentesting is also more a craft than it is an art, but it does offer the opportunity for creative and artistic problem-solving. The bulk of the time on a pentest (maybe 75%) should be established procedures: i.e., your testers are using a given methodology for the technologies involved.

The remainder of the project time (maybe 25%) can then be spent on creative approaches to breaking the system.

Without Standardization, Pentesters Are Wasting Time

Without set, standardized, and organized methodologies in place, your testers are often winging it on a job. They are spending a lot of time “re-inventing the wheel.”

For example, a tester may be doing the same vulnerability test on a Citrix environment as another tester did the week before, but because there’s no set repository for your company’s knowledge and no set methodology, the tester spends time researching the most current attack vectors and techniques worth pursuing.

And that’s time he could have spent creatively hacking, after performing the minimum, required tests.

So instead of spending 25% of the project time trying some unique approaches to breaking the system, he winds up running out of time, having only enough time to complete the bare minimum required tests.

He may get some small satisfaction out of feeling he “did everything on his own”, but at what price? He has lost an opportunity to really focus his creative talents on the system at hand. Most importantly, the client has not been served optimally, either.

Obstacles to Standardization

Let’s look at the major cultural obstacles to instituting established methodologies at InfoSec companies.

Hacker Ethos

People who are interested in hacking and pentesting often have a lot of traits in common, such as:

—A high value on creativity. —A high value on being able to do things

spontaneously and off the cuff (because that shows true understanding).

—Disdain for following rules. —Disdain for authority.

Understanding that these traits may be true for some of your team members will help you communicate with them.

This may also help you convince them why standardization should be something they support and not something to fight or run from. Standardization will leave them more time to have fun (i.e., break stuff and learn new things).

Knowledge-Hiding

In our last article we talked about knowledge transfer and how important it is for your team members to share information.

But tech workers can have a lot of ego and pride associated with the knowledge and experience they’ve accumulated. This can manifest as an unwillingness to share knowledge, and possibly even a desire to hide knowledge.

This is not just a problem in InfoSec. This happens in many companies, across all industries.

Hiding knowledge can also be seen as a strategy to make oneself more irreplaceable. The thinking goes: “If I tell my coworkers everything I know, what use am I? They’ll easily replace me.”

But this is a false conclusion. It is based on the idea that an employee’s worth is based on mere facts, checklists, and procedures when, in fact, an employee’s worth is based on much broader factors, including:

—The ability to learn new things and understand how things work together.

—A willingness to contribute to a team.

One way to combat this obstacle is to show the many benefits of sharing knowledge, including:—Other people more easily recognize your

expertise, which leads to respect from peers.—Other people recognize your willingness to share

and teach others, which also leads to respect. —Others are more willing to share with you the

things that they know, which increases your knowledge.

Again, these can be ingrained cultural obstacles that are hard to overcome. But the more you can make your team members see these benefits, the more you can start to make progress in shifting the culture.

Past Process Failures

Another obstacle may be that your workers have negative associations with past company attempts at standardization. This may be attempts made at your company or at companies they’ve previously worked for.

For example, one of your testers may hear that you’re trying to set up repositories for methodologies and think something like: “They tried this at my last company.

They had me go through weeks of establishing methodologies and putting them in certain places. And what happened? Nobody cared and nobody ended up using them. These attempts at standardization are a waste of time.”

Unfortunately, due to the sub-par way most process improvement is implemented, this can be an understandable reaction. Understanding this resistance on the part of your team members can help you combat that resistance in terms they will understand.

Start Small

For all the obstacles mentioned above, it’s important to start with small steps.

One of the first small steps is simply communicating with your team. Talk to your team members and try to educate them on the ideas in this article.

Have team meetings where you emphasize that standard protocols won’t constrict them; they’re a ticket to more creative freedom.Tell them you want to save their prime brainpower for solving the big problems, not reinventing the wheel on the usual ones, and standardization allows them to do that.

As we talked about in our last article on Knowledge Transfer, it’s important to first ensure that a process is being used by everyone. In other words, don’t spend massive amounts of hours on trying to set up a process and getting people to contribute to methodology repositories if you’re not sure or can even verify if the process is being used.

Start small. Create a simple process that your team members must follow (even if that means they are still doing a lot of other things on their own). Make sure the process is being followed by all team members and establish a simple means of verifying that it is a living, useful tool.

Once you have a system in place that is being used, then you can incrementally improve it. As we’ve been talking about in this series, this is the basis for long-term, lasting improvement in a company.

This Applies To Everything

This improvement process can play out in all other aspects of your company.

For example, once you standardize your scoping and scheduling, and get them down to an exact, efficient science, that leaves more time for your team to work on more important things, like brainstorming new, creative ways to do those tasks, or working on getting new business.

Or if your salespeople have a streamlined system for handling and nurturing leads, this will result in them spending more time on brainstorming better selling strategies. In short: every system you standardize opens up more room for creativity and improvement.

Next...

Hopefully with this article we’ve given you increased clarity on some ways to combat some cultural obstacles you may be facing at your company. Specifically, we hope this article has helped you see the reasons why process standardization leads to your testers being more creative and productive, not less.

If this article strikes a chord with you, please reach out and let us know the challenges at your company and maybe some unique things you’ve done to enact change.

In the next few articles in this series, we’ll discuss some other areas of InfoSec project management, including ways to stabilize and/or increase revenue, and more strategies for creating sustainable cultural change.

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Security Roots’ founder Daniel Martin conceived and created the open-source collaboration tool Dradis Framework in 2007. The success of that application led to the creation of the Security Roots company and Dradis Professional Edition software.

Over the years, Security Roots has helped hundreds of InfoSec clients improve their team collaboration and report creation processes. If you have any questions about what we do or the solutions we provide, please fill out our Contact Form and we’ll be in touch right away.