Security Investment Assessment

2022 NACo Achievement Award Winner

Oakland County, Mich., MI

Image of AchievementAwards_extension_bkg_0.jpg

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2022

Spending on Information Security processes, tools, and personnel is fraught with many problems. Questions on the right level of spending, ensuring that spending goes against the right areas that need it, and the right personnel to run/monitor it are front and center. In the background, but no less important are: how can I justify and defend my current spending allocation to my team, my IT Leadership, the County Executive, an external auditor or to a concerned citizen? How can they be assured the Security program is spending its resources in a manner that will reduce the most risk per dollar spent, rather through the purchase of new tools, creation or enhancement of processes, or remediating risk with current processes and tooling? It is against that backdrop that Oakland County undertook a journey to define a set of processes and tools to help create a repeatable, defensible methodology to ensure an efficient allocation of tax dollars across the multitude of people, processes and technology needed to defend against attacks in today’s shifting threat landscape, and to do so in a defensible, cost effective manner