Information security is very much product driven and very much network perimeter security driven at that:   firewalls, IPS, DLP, anti-virus, database firewalls, application firewalls, security information management systems and more.
It is convenient for a customer to buy a product and feel “secure” but, as businesses become more and more interconnected, as cloud services percolate deeper and deeper into organizations, and as  government compliance regulation becomes more complex and pervasive; the security “problem” becomes more difficult to solve and even harder to sell.
I believe that there are 3 reasons why it’s hard to sell security:
The first is that it’s complex stuff, hard to explain and even harder to build a cost-justified security countermeasure plan and measure security ROI.  The nonsense propagated by security vendors like Symantec and Websense do little to improve the situation and only exacerbate the low level of credibility for security product effectiveness with  pseudo science and ROI calculations written by wet-behind-the-ears English majors marcom people who freelance for security vendors – as I’ve noted in previous posts here, here, here and here.
The second is related to prospect theory. A CEO is risk hungry for a high impact, low probability event (like an attack on his message queuing transaction processing systems) or theft of IP by a competitior and risk averse to low impact, high probability events like malware and garden variety dictionary attacks on every ssh service on the Net.
The third is related to psychology.   Why is it a good idea to cold call a CIO and tell him that the multi-million dollar application his business developed is highly vulnerable?    Admitting that his software is vulnerable and going to the board to ask for big bucks to fix the problem is tantamount to admitting that he didn’t do his job and that someone else should pay the price.  Very bad idea.
This is why cloud services are a hit.
Security is baked into the service. You pay for the computing/storage/messaging resource like you buy electricity. The security is “someone else’s problem”  and let’s face it, the security professionals at Rackspace or Amazon or Google App Engine are better at security than we are. It’s part of their core business.
The next step after cloud services is the security industry evolving into a B2B industry like the automotive or energy industry.  You don’t buy brakes from a McAfee and a car from Checkpoint – you buy a car from GM and brakes are part of the system.
That’s where we need to go – building the security into the product instead of bolting it on as an after-sale extra