Looking Backwards from the Future

The Wall St Journal reported on a set of studies to see if people would turn from spenders to savers if they looked through VR at their older self. What would your older self want you to do? Buy that humungous TV or put some money away for a rainy day?

For some perspective, China's saving rate is close to 50%,while the US hovers close to zero percent.  This study showed that people's willingness to save increased when looking at their future selves. Jim Rogers has a great practice on saving - when you think of buying something today, simply multiply its cost by twenty to see how much it will be worth down the road when you are retired. A dinner out is "only" $75, but would you still go out to eat if you figured the cost at $1,500? Warren Buffett pithily sums this up as - do I really need a $300,000 haircut?

Enterprise investment in security is quite similar, the near term returns and cost avoidance are hard to clarify for security pros and easy to pass on for managers, but what if you look back at yourself dealing with a security event? Would that change your thinking about the right investments to make today?

For my part, I see very little difference in the mindset of planning and saving for a rainy day and planning and investing for security event.

There is one twist in the enterprise though - the never-ending reorganizations! For individuals thinking about retirements its mainly a when not an if. But in the enterprise, where re-orgs every six months are the norm, the manager is not able to view themselves dealing with a breach because the person sitting in the chair will be someone else! 

I have heard it said that you should never write a project plan that extends over six months because by then the sponsors and management will be gone (note - I think this fact more than anything else is responsible for the success of agile methods). This is particularly problematic for security where some longer term view is required in design and architecture.

Incident response plans can be a good source of the looking backward from the future view, use the security events in those planning exercises to see what you'll wish you had had in place. Hint: logs.

Comments

[Slonob]

Inflation is not a natural phenomenon. It results from the policy of banking cartels (unnatural).

In the current climate, it would be stupid to simply save but it's also stupid to join a market that is openly rigged (see Maiden Lane).

In other words, you could say that saving is discouraged by monetary policy or, to be admittedly more extreme, that savings are plundered by those who control and benefit from monetary policy.

Who benefits? Banks that have access to free money (and even get to charge interest on the public debt) and politicians who can fund anything and everything that they can dream up from welfare entitlements to war with disregard for the purse.

Rather than assume that inflation is a given, we need start seeing it as obfuscated taxation.

[Hardware for Distributed System]

Not only in China the Saving rate of Eastern world is Generally way higher than Saving rate of the West.