The New School of Information Security

Chapter 6Spending

All organizations face three universal questions about their security spending: why spend, how much to spend, and on what to spend. The efficiency of spending is clearly important to companies. The effectiveness of security spending matters to business partners, and ultimately to customers. Spending is clearly also an economic activity with psychological aspects and ties to many of the New School ideas that we have described in the previous chapters. As such, spending provides us with the opportunity to evaluate current thinking through the lens of the New School.

Spending is where decisions become concrete. The allocation of scarce resources shows what people think is worthwhile. A frequently quoted statistic is that organizations ...