Are You Making the Most of Your Security Operations Center?
Posted on Tue, Jun 07, 2011
By ASG's Professional Services Group
I am going to guess, like many organizations out there, you are strapped for cash. Your CFO or finance department has told you to reduce your budget 10% from last year. Because of this you simply don’t have the bandwidth to do anything new. And you know that with another status quo year, that status quo is going to catch up with you sooner or later.
If your organization has an operations center here are three quick ways to increase the scope of your group, consolidate the resources of the company and potentially increase the leverage of your budget due to your capabilities.
Consolidating Opportunities
What would a 24x7 Operations Center look like if you helped manage other duties of the organization? There are some operations areas that require part-time or on-call roles or even managing other operation centers. By consolidating duties, roles and responsibilities, you are able to cut back on costs and increase budgets elsewhere.
I recently learned about an organization that took the landscaping and the coordination of it and merged it within the operations center responsibilities. Since the Center was operating 24x7 they were able to manage the maintenance as well. Without having to add head count they were able to increase the efficiency of the company and utilize the assets and infrastructure that already exists. Within the context of the organization and campus, the operations center can quickly connect key people to make decisions including grass and lawn care.
Network operations centers seem to be popping up all over the place but are often located apart from the Security Operations Center. Why? Politics? Silos? Ignorance? Regardless, combining the security operations center with network operations centers combines two nerve centers of your organization. This consolidation can often times cut infrastructure costs in half.
As well, when an emergency occurs, this convergence can combine forces to help one another in a compelling and integrated manner. This way a unified and integrated response to a crisis is relayed to the business leaders. This inspires confidence and creates velocity at the point of need.
Do people travel in your organization? What would it look like to provide employees with a 24x7 line to call when they are traveling If managed by the network operations center, it would allow anyone with the ability to connect to one central location. Now the organization increases its effectiveness to serve the security needs and business needs of its employees. They can receive help, advice and even get messages to someone. This type of service is a great way not only for your team to understand what they are going through but also offer the opportunity to help them when they are in need. Sure, it has little to do with security, but it definitely helps them with efficiency and their safety.
The key to all of this is the identification, quantification, and communication of value. If you simply view security operations centers as something where someone sits behind a desk and views cameras, then that could be the reason why your organization views it the same way and your annual budget keeps shrinking. Let me tell you, viewing cameras is not that valuable (especially when you think they can still view 16 at once).
So how can you incorporate other parts of the company into what you do? Where can you help people and provide service 24x7? In what ways can you cut down on costs in infrastructure to save funding? The three ways above are a start and I guarantee that if you show savings, you can get some of that money back in increased budget the following year enable your organization to go from status quo to status go!