RE: Charging customers on security

Yes that sounds reasonable... But you don't get security without effort.
And management is not going bankroll that effort if they don't think
customers are willing to pay for it.  That payment may be clear and up
front as an "extra" item, or bundled in to the overall cost of a
product.  That means that there is likely to be extra items in your
estimates for the additional cost of security.  These are just the kind
of things sales teams like to whittle when "massaging" the dev
estimates.

I can't help thinking the way forward is to work security requirements
into the analysis phase.  These may be a fairly standard reusable set
that can be customised for different situations.  Spending effort down
the track is much easier (at least for solutions work) if you can point
to a requirement and say "We have no choice.  We must satisfy the agreed
requirement or get it written out with a change request". 

Mitch

-----Original Message-----
From: wirepair [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, 27 September 2004 8:40 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Charging customers on security


Charging for security of your own applications? That seems pretty
backwards to me. Why should the client who buys your software with the
expectation that it works and is secure have to pay for the fact that it
isn't? So when my seat belts are broken, and my tires randomly explode,
I have to pay the car manufacturer more money to get these features
fixed?

duh?
-wire

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:16:40 -0700
  King Pang <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Our company developers Microsoft Solutions and I am responsible for 
> leading the security initiative in the corporation.  I have spent a 
> lot of time and effort on how we should apply security guidance to our

> product life cycle, such as adding threat modeling and doing security 
> review.  But after I have convinced them that security is important, 
> we brought up a discussion on how we should charge our customers.
> 
> Many of you have customer experience.  They want to pay the minimum 
> and have all the features.  If they can choose not to pay, they won't.

> If we tell them threat modeling will add x human-weeks of development 
> and we have to charge them x thousand dollars more, they won't pay. 
> Moreover, they expect the system to be secure enough and if there is 
> anything wrong, they would think that is our fault.
> 
> If any of you have any experience on dealing security with customers 
> and how you would deal with this issue, please throw in two cents. Any

> comments or related articles would help too.
> 
> Warm Regards.

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