Is delivering a new security product like delivering a good wine?
Simon Hartley
Cybersecurity Practice Leader @IBM | Business of Cybersecurity, Mobility, Quantum
Introduction
What can we learn about introducing a new enterprise security product from looking at legacy products and different kinds of innovation???I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts from the startup world.
Wine is a classic legacy consumer product – it’s been around for a long time and there is abundant market and competitor data to analyze.?Also, wine is a little more abundant in home offices today than it once was in corporate cube farms in the past!?
Old wine
Economist Orley Ashenfelter famously produced an index of Bordeaux wine quality that reduced it to just a few key factors from past agricultural data.
Wine Quality Score = – 12.145
+ 0.00117??????* Winter Rainfall
+ 0.0614????????* Average Growing Season Temperature
– 0.00386??????* Harvest Rainfall
+ 0.0238???????? *Age of Vintage
Such a data-based approach appealed little to industry connoisseurs, who liked to focus more on the art of marketing and branding of wines than on the scientific fundamentals of growing, fermenting, and packaging grapes.
New wine in old skins
How does that help us with new security products in general???If a new product is joining an existing and commoditized marketplace like say firewalls or anti-virus products, or adds an incremental improvement to them like “faster processing” or “machine learning” then modeling from existing data should be relatively straightforward.
Legacy security companies have done this for years, with each "new season" bringing new chips, disks, and more efficient algorithms.?The key factors are well-known to meeting confidentiality, integrity, and availability security goals for government and enterprise customers.?
New wine in new skins
What happens if the new product adds a wholly new factor, or drastically re-works current factors while still solving the customer’s security problems? Disruption!
Professor Clayton Christensen talked about this as the “Innovator’s Dilemma” where legacy vendors have trouble moving on from a long established set of factors that they have always focused on, especially if they have confused the “what” problem is to be solved question with the “how” it is to be solved one.
It happened with wine boxes and new world market entrants like mechanized production from Australia. It is happening in the cyber industry too, as innovation cycles move forward in mobile, cloud, social, and IoT dimensions that don't map perfectly to older PC, wired, and Wi-Fi models.
In looking at disruptive new products, the wine connoisseurs are in fact more right than wrong in that an analysis has to be a mix of?marketing and positioning balanced with looking at existing factors e.g.
·?????Base line security
·?????Speed
·?????Affordability
·?????Staffing load - a Wizard open to anyone or just that $250K/year contractor
·?????User experience - "Easy button" or PHD science project
·?????Ease of deployment and support by admins
·?????Interoperability with complimentary products and services
·?????Ability to update quickly
·?????Better fit to “new normal” marketplaces such as shift / remote work
Life would be too dull if everything were simply plodding along the same cart ruts to market rather than breaking out with innovation and creativity.