a. Security as a feeling and a reality.
Schneier (2008) identified security as a feeling and reality.
• As a feeling: Security is based on your psychological reactions to both risks and countermeasures. It is based on fear and anxiety emotions that communicate danger in the environment provoking reactions of fight or flight. The emotions are based on our perceptions actual or distorted hence appropriate action or exaggerated action. You might feel terribly afraid of terrorism, or you might feel like it's not something worth worrying about. You might feel safer when you enter in a supermarket with guards checking all people with metal detectors, or you might not. You can feel secure even though you're not.
• As a reality: Security is based on mathematical calculations on actual risk. Given enough data, it's easy to accurately assess the level of security in your life and environment. Real security or security risk is based on experience and actual happenings in our environment. For example, if in your area three people are killed every week by thugs or two political groups are fighting for control killing people indiscriminately, you are actually at risk.
The feeling and reality of security are certainly related to each other, but they're just as certainly not the same as each other.
b. Security as a natural need
Security is a natural need to all organisms. Fear and anxiety communicates the presence of insecurity in the environment. Faced with a threatening stimulus all organisms respond with fear, anxiety and accompanying physiological and behavioral reactions. The person responds either with a fight or flight, a product of neural functioning of the body to tackle the cause or avoid it. In his hierarchy of needs Maslow (1971) identified security as a second order need from physiological needs. People want control and order in their lives, so this need for safety and security contributes largely to behaviors at this level. Some of the basic security and safety needs include:
a. Financial security
b. Health and wellness
c. Safety against accidents and injury
d. Finding a job or means of livelihood
e. Obtaining health insurance and health care
f. Contributing money to a savings account
g. Physical security as in being in a secure environment
Together, the safety and physiological levels of the hierarchy make up what is often referred to as the basic needs.
c. Security as tradeoffs
A trade-off is a situation that involves losing one quality or aspect of something for gaining another quality or aspect in return. It often implies a decision to be made with full comprehension of both the upside and downside of a particular choice; the term is also used in an evolutionary context, in which case the selection process acts as the "decision-maker". There's no such thing as absolute security, and any gain in security always involves some sort of trade-off (Schneider, 2008). Security takes planning, and resources. A trade-off, then, involves a sacrifice that must be made to obtain a certain product, rather than other products that can be made using the same required resources. Any security policy needs to consider a number of factors:
• Elimination of treat
• People’s rights and liberties
• Cost
• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
d. Security as decision making process
Security always has a multidimensional causality. Brady, (2011) suggests a multi-criteria method of options analysis to come up with a sound decision in security trade-off. The steps are listed linearly for ease of understanding but rarely does a decision process unfold without iteration. Thoughtful multi- criteria analysis leads you to loop back-and-forth between steps, clarifying and refining your thinking as you go.
Titany answered the question on
December 7, 2021 at 06:46