Security Learns From Eastern Manufacturing Philosophy

Leading companies are borrowing a page from Eastern philosophy to achieve “intelligent security” – moving from point product solutions into a secure, optimized state.

Security practitioners have been struggling with too many tools, consoles and reports to be effective. To truly be successful as a security practice, you must have maturity with regard to policies, processes and protection. For years, the goal of security providers has been to provide layered security for their customers. This is the concept of breaking down each vulnerability and threat, and mitigating it at every layer.

“Suriawase” has been successfully used by Toyota, among others. The rise of Toyota has been well documented, and provides many valuable lessons to businesses around the globe. As we apply this philosophy to security we will end up with better protection, more efficient and effective processes and timely and manageable reports that integrate across multiple products and functional areas. The end result? A cost effective, scalable, and finely-tuned security operation.

Toyota has constantly improved the quality of its output and maturing its manufacturing process. University of Tokyo economics professor, Fujimoto Takahiro, asserts that ‘Suriawase’ is the reason for their success. Suriwase has many definitions, but most aptly means integrating numerous parts into a single, finely-tuned product. Suriwase entails putting the numerous pieces together and selecting components that maximize the performance and quality. It helps focus collaboration across disparate divisions and departments that are critical to the success of the process or product.