Productive Security

The majority of employees within an organisation are hired to execute specific jobs, such as marketing, managing projects, manufacturing goods or overseeing financial investment. Their main – sometimes only – priority will be to efficiently complete their core business activity, so information security will usually only be a secondary consideration. Consequently, employees will be reluctant to invest more than a limited amount of effort and time on such a secondary task that they rarely understand, and from which they perceive no benefit.

Research[1] suggests that when security mechanisms cause additional work, employees will favour non-compliant behaviour in order to complete their primary tasks quickly.

There is a lack of awareness among security managers[2] about the burden that security mechanisms impose on employees, because it is assumed that the users can easily accommodate the effort that security compliance requires. In reality, employees tend to experience a negative impact on their performance because they feel that these cumbersome security mechanisms drain both their time and their effort. The risk mitigation achieved through compliance, from their perspective, is not worth the disruption to their productivity. In extreme cases, the more urgent the delivery of the primary task is, the more appealing and justifiable non-compliance becomes, regardless of employees’ awareness of the risks.

When security mechanisms hinder or significantly slow down employees’ performance, they will cut corners, and reorganise and adjust their primary tasks in order to avoid them. This seems to be particularly prevalent in file sharing, especially when users are restricted by permissions, by data storage or transfer allowance, and by time-consuming protocols. People will usually work around the security mechanisms and resort to the readily available commercial alternatives, which may be insecure. From the employee’s perspective, the consequences of not completing a primary task are severe, as opposed to the ‘potential’ consequences of the risk associated with breaching security policies.

If organisations continue to set equally high goals for both security and business productivity, they are essentially leaving it up to their employees to resolve potential conflicts between them. Employees will focus most of their time and effort on carrying out their primary tasks efficiently and in a timely manner, which means that their target will be to maximise their own benefit, as opposed to the company’s. It is therefore vital for organisations to find a balance between both security and productivity, because when they fail to do so, they lead – or even force – their employees to resort to non-compliant behaviour. When companies are unable to recognise and correct security mechanisms and policies that affect performance and when they exclusively reward their employees for productivity, not for security, they are effectively enabling and reinforcing non-compliant decision-making on behalf of the employees.

Employees will only comply with security policies if they are motivated to do so: they must have the perception that compliant behaviour results in personal gain. People must be given the tools and the means to understand the potential risks associated with their roles, as well as the benefits of compliant behaviour, both to themselves and to the organisation. Once they are equipped with this information and awareness, they must be trusted to make their own decisions that can serve to mitigate risks at the organisational level.

References:

[1] Iacovos Kirlappos, Adam Beautement and M. Angela Sasse, “‘Comply or Die’ Is Dead: Long Live Security-Aware Principal Agents”, in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Springer, 2013, 70–82.

[2] Leron Zinatullin, “The Psychology of Information Security.”, IT Governance Publishing, 2016.

Photo by Nick Carter https://www.flickr.com/photos/8323834@N07/500995147/