Is Near Enough Good Enough?

Many of us strive for perfection. Whether it's keeping our homes tidy, finishing that next proposal or making sure we follow up with all our customers, we all want to ensure that we do things to the best of our ability. I know I do. I would prefer to action my tasks once with high quality and then move onto the next item rather than having to go back and continuously work on previous items.

However perfection comes at the cost of time. In our modern busy world we all have to deal with more. More work. More systems. More customers. What we don't have more of is time. Is perfection the best approach? Maybe we need to be more pragmatic with how we approach it. We've all heard of the 80/20 rule. Target the high impact aspects with the time that you have and receive most of the benefit. We could all do with more time to spend on what's most important.

Cyber security may also benefit from this approach. Active threats are more prevalent with more businesses being targeted and compromised than ever before. Attacks that were once focused only against large enterprises are now also impacting smaller businesses making the task that much harder. While it may be difficult to accept, we need to realise that we will all eventually experience a cyber security incident at some stage. We can't continuously protect ourselves from all threats. That's an impossible task. What we can do is cast a net to cover the essentials and make sure we are ready to respond when something eventually passes through. And make no mistake, it will.

Protecting your business is important, however none of us have an endless bucket of money to throw at the problem. You need to spend wisely, targeting those areas that pose the highest risk and periodically re-evaluate what you are doing, as what works today may no longer be effective in 12 months. Striving for perfection is a train ride with no stop in sight, and that just wastes everyone's time.

Maybe near enough is better than perfect.

Simon Horn, Chief Information Security Officer