You have no thumbs!

Many years ago, I received a seemingly random text from a friend. He said he was sitting in a meeting and it suddenly dawned on him, “You have no thumbs!” The response from the table was, “So? We’ve never had thumbs before!”

Obviously, everyone at the table had actual thumbs, but he was referring to discovering missing functionality in the product he was working on which he considered as fundamental to its function as our thumbs are to our hands. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this exchange quite frequently, as we work to innovate and solve our old problems in a more efficient way. It feels like every day, I have the same conversation day in and day out, trying to convince people that thumbs are nice to have.

Let’s face it – most problems in security are not new. Sure, every once in a while, a technology comes along that requires new controls and a new way of looking at things. We’re hitting challenges of scale that we never dreamt possible 20 years ago. Most of our fundamental problems have been solved for quite a while, though. However, we also have technologies available to us now that we never dreamt possible 20 years ago. The scalability of cloud services and containerisation lead to mind blowing possibilities. So… why are we still dependent on 20 year old workflows?

I have joked that the entire security industry has Stockholm syndrome. We absolutely despise the products available to us for our old problems – vulnerability management, patch management, or incident management, just to name a few – but we accept that the basic workflows they all share is simply the best we can get. When we think about innovation, we’re usually thinking about how nice it would be to get this feature over here implemented in this other vendor’s product to do this thing that works well for one specific use case.

What if there were better options, though? What if someone told you today that you could have opposable thumbs to give you leverage you’ve never had before? Would you be open to that conversation? So often, I see folks slamming the door on innovation because “We’ve never had thumbs before!” Sure, your workflow is working as fine as it was 20 years ago when you first implemented it, but was it ever truly efficient? Are your metrics telling an effective story of success? Can you directly attribute a change in trends to actions your workflow drove?

It’s high time we stop accepting that the way we’ve always done things is the best way to do it. Challenge convention. Solve old problems in new ways with new technology. Think about what would be possible if we started over with the lessons we’ve learned, rather than accepting the “old trusty” solutions you’ve always depended on. We’ve never had thumbs before, but they sure are handy!