The Control Policy Group is presenting a series of 6 free online workshops starting Sep 3, 2009 at 15:00GMT. The first workshop, “Using data security metrics and a value-based approach”,  will teach measurement of how well  security tools reduce Value at Risk in dollars (or in Euro) and how well they will do 3 years from now.
The Control Policy Group is providing these workshops as a free service to the security and risk professionals community after having identified a gap between the security practioner and the management board.
The gap is this: the management speaks the language of money and security practioners speak the language of technical security countermeasures like DLP, database security and messaging security.
From a management board perspective, budgets for security projects like DLP are a capital cost in a down GFC economy – Control Policy Group clients in Europe and the Middle East have slashed down security and risk budgets about 50% since the beginning of the year.
From a security and risk practioner perspective, data breaches went up almost 50% in 2008, there is more phishing, more web defacing, more Web applications to secure and yet – less head-count and capital budget to do the job.
In order to close the gap – the Control Policy Group have built a model that helps an organization measure how well a new security product reduces Value at Risk in dollars (or in Euro) and how well it will do 3 years after you buy the technology.
Modern security tools are good at discovering exploitable vulnerabilities in the network, Web servers and applications.  However – since these tools have no notion of your business context and how much you value your information assets,  it is likely that a company’s security spending is misdirected.
This series of workshops is designed to help the security and risk team  take a  leadership role in the board room instead of waiting for vendor proposals. Through specific Business Threat Modeling(TM) tactical methods, you will learn how to quantify threats, valuate your risk and choose the most cost-effective security technologies to protect your data.