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A Balancing Act: When Security Controls Disrupt Operations | Week 10

In an ideal world security controls should integrate seamlessly with business strategy and through policy and procedure support operations. In reality however security controls often disrupt operations. From a user perspective an Information Security Department is simply a group of people sitting behind computers all day saying “no” to everyone. Although that is sometimes the case (“no” is a common word in their vocabulary from what I have seen), there are reasons behind it. 

This week I want to share a story of how a change in policy and procedure by one security department, disrupted current operational workflow in another. Our AV engineering team works with integration vendors to build out the videoconferencing infrastructure through our offices. One day our director of security decided this vendor had too many badges assigned to them and wanted to reel back access to physical locations by limiting the badges to 2.  

The reasoning was sound from a security perspective, but the logistics proved difficult. Rarely did the vendor send the same technician on-site in any consistent fashion. To accommodate our company’s needs, the vendor required assistance from whichever technician might have been available at the time. Suddenly, the techs could not gain access to spaces they required access to. Service calls were delayed, rooms and infrastructure had to remain broken for longer, and SLAs were missed because the scheduling process was now bottlenecked on the vendor’s side while we had to wait for one of 2 specific technicians who retained badge access to be freed up.  

The disruption eventually lessoned as we worked with the security team to change their policy to allow for 2 shared badges that do not need to be assigned to a specific person. SLAs are now back on-track and we are able to properly schedule again. This goes to show however the disruption one policy change can cause without a proper cost-benefits analysis or governance meeting.  

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