Tradeoffs

The SAFE Blueprint is intended to lay out an architecture that implements a secure and functional network. As with any operating arrangement in which two sets of goals do not align (such as politics), compromises must generally be made to get anything actually done. You might see a graph like the one in Figure 4.2 in any book about implementing security; it helps you visualize where and when to make the compromises. (The SAFE Blueprint has design alternatives available to help you frame the compromises.)

Figure 4.2. Tradeoffs between cost and protection.

The more you increase your security protection, the more it will cost you, and the costs increase at an increasing rate because the cost of more sophisticated protection increases rapidly . At the same time, as you increase your security protection, the cost of failure declines, though at a decreasing rate (because the protections become more problem-specific and thus have a narrower applicability across the spectrum of remaining issues).

As you progress in applying the SAFE Blueprint to a network, the principles behind Figure 4.2 will be one of your guides. Many security exposures could be corrected, but some will not be financially feasible . With no security protection in place, so many possible points of failure exist that the cost is very high. At the same time, many security improvements are not expensive to implement, although some improvements (such as a stronger password policy) lead to human inconvenience and higher indirect costs.

The net result is that you will reach a point at which the cost of the security improvement exceeds the savings from reduced security failure cost. There is no business reason to go furtherand SAFE recognizes that the network and its security are subject to business analysis, just like any other organizational expense.