It is a common discussion during an information security risk assessment exercise at most of the organizations. As a general practice the asset value is derived by weighing the confidentiality ©, Integrity (I) and availability (A) value of an asset. While the assets are categorized into Information, Hardware, Software, Service and People, my argument always has been to say that C-I-A values can be assessed for Information Assets only and for all other it should just be the availability value.
Posts Tagged Information Security
Assessing C-I-A values.
Dec 23
In the recent incident of Dr. APJ Kalam been frisked at the IGI airport by the staff of Continental Airlines has created some news. The Airline has also tendered an apology to Dr. Kalam for the inconvienence caused – this is as reported in the TimesofIndia daily newspaper on 22nd July 2009.
Now does that apology mean that Continental Airlines will not frisk any VIP’s in future while they board the flight..? I see a security concern here.
Discussing with various personnel it is quite amazing to see each one come up with their own way of interpreting controls and to what depth each control need to be implemented. I would like to illustrate a discussion that I had recently. The standard too does not talk about this and it is left to the person who implements and to the auditor on how they want to look at the implementation effectiveness.
Up until now some of the aspects that we look into while implementing a control is as mentioned below;
- Is the control implementation cost less than or equal to loss of the damage a threat could cause to an organization?
- Does the control implementation enable process improvements?
- Is the control implementation required as a part of legal, regulator or contractual requirements?
The very first lesson taught to me in my computer classes where “A computer is as smart as you are” and this statement holds good even today. For the computer would do only that a person would want it to do. The only advantage a computer has over human is that of speed and storage capacity.
While looking at various aspects of data loss, the end reason always point to “PEOPLE”. The above statement holds good not only because there are data loss (which is now the high rated security risks), even if you look at any frauds that has happened in the recent past, everything has been manipulated by “HUMAN”. No matters what standards are adopted, what stringent rules are set in an organization, frauds still happen.
All the while we have been hearing and believing that ISMS implementation in any organization requires management approval without which it would be a failure. True!!!
For any project in an organization for that matter, management approvals are a must cause for a project to kick-start and complete with desired results, requires resources, budget, tools etc. These can be achieved only if the project manager shows the management that there is value created by doing this project which could favor the organization. The value could be of many ways which ultimately boils down to making profits or avoiding monetary/image loss.
