Re: HECVAT Security Assessment Question

["José A. Domínguez" <jad () UOREGON EDU>]

Hello Sue. Your approach seems similar to what I am trying to do at UO.
I am engaging the office of Purchasing and Contracting Services and
working on adopting HECVAT as part of their evaluation criteria for
vendor selection. That way it's part of what the vendors need to do if
they want our business and it's part of what departments need to look
for when engaging businesses. The question is agreeing on what kind of
cloud service solution requires what level of evaluation. I'll let you
know how successful this approach is.

José.


On 7/7/17 5:14 AM, Sue McGlashan wrote:
> Hi Mark
>
> You derailed the conversation exactly into what I was talking about yesterday within our team - speediness vs 
> effectiveness. We need to be both effective and efficient, but effective does take time. Please see more below, and 
> thank you for opening the conversation.
>
>     >   At Brown, we are trying to move towards adopting HECVAT/HECVAT Lite for all vendor assessments as well. So 
> far, we haven’t run into the IBM scenario yet and we had our first instance of a vendor (Workfront) who had already 
> seen it and turned it around almost instantly, thanks for whomever forged the way for us!
>       
>      >   If I could derail this conversation slightly, I’d be really interested in learning what your staffing to 
> support vendor assessments looks like. We seem to be continuously trying to play catch up with assessments 
>
> Yes, we play a game of catch up all of the time, and any delayed projects seem to arrive in the middle of a high 
> volume of projects, not when we had planned time to complete them  … we all know this story
> - and I am sure you all also have internal projects, and you probably also need to look at both privacy and security.
>
>     > and it’s taking way more time than the cycles we have allotted. A vast majority of our time seems to be tied up 
> in chasing down information and getting people to actually respond! 
>
> Agreed about the time, and to make it worse, sometimes the response is poor, so although a questionnaire is provided, 
> it is filled in by marketing, or else the vendor has a weak security team - i.e. we cannot use it as is.  
>
> Solution? -  Please let me know if you have other suggestions.    I am adjusting our process - we need a better 
> intake, so that as vendor responses comes in, we quickly review the supplied documentation, and immediately contact 
> the vendor if the information is inadequate. This should reduce the overall time per project, but it will interrupt 
> current projects. I am hoping for a longer-term win.
>
>     > Although in some cases, wading through the reams of documentation from a vendor can take significant time as 
> well. At present, our team of two-part time people (very part time on paper for at least one of these anyways) seems 
> to be consistently trying to do contract reviews and security assessments on just North of 20 contracts concurrently. 
> I’m trying to figure out if we are just hugely inefficient, we are attempting to be too detailed in our reviews, or 
> we are truly understaffed. Are we the only ones in this situation? Anyone have a better model?
>      > Mark
>
> Overall, it takes time!  I am looking at how we can more efficiently complete an assessment, but I do not want to 
> change to a check box approach since we have discovered some concerns that such an approach would not have.  However, 
> when I asked the team to be more efficient, that was interpreted as rushing the work, resulting in the need to 
> re-review some of the assessment.
>
> No, you are not the only ones in this situation.
> If we decide an assessment must be completed, we should be thorough.
> Yes, I think if we are to do all of the assessments, we will need more staff. (but e.g. workfront - hopefully in the 
> longer term we will be able to share the results of our security reports/assessments, so we are also not each 
> individually reviewing each vendor).
>
> But could we triage better?  Probably.
>
> We are working towards a self-assessment for some smaller internal applications, followed by providing an application 
> vulnerability scan, and random full assessments. This idea evolved from listening to talks at the Educause conference.
>
> Thanks
> Sue McGlashan
>  
>    
>    
>

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature