Tracking Man-Hours and Expenses – CompTIA Security+ SY0-401: 2.4

Processing a security incident can be an expensive endeavor. In this video, you’ll learn the importance of proper expense accounting and why tracking these details is an important consideration.

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And after tracking these people, and getting your interviews, and finding out what’s happened with an incident, you’re going to find that the cost of these go up, and up, and up. You may have seen sometimes when you’re reading some of our trade magazines, that a company said that we had a breach, and it cost this much money. And what they’ve done is compiled not just the financial impact of that event itself, but they’ve also calculated in how long did it take us to research this? How many people were involved? How many man-hours were spent on this? All of these resources cost money. So you’re going to have to see not only what happened immediately when the event occurred, but as time goes on, as you’re researching and trying to recover from that incident, how long did it really take.

And some of these things go into our legal system. They can take months or even years. And of course, that all means more man-hours are put towards resolving this issue. These can have an impact on the bottom line. Somebody can steal money from your organization. That’s obviously something that would impact what resources your company might have. But that bottom line view can be also very wide-ranging. You also have people that are spending time on the back end, trying to piece together what happened, that could be doing other things that would make your organization more money. So you have to do some interesting calculations over these man-hours and what you’re doing.

Try to be as accurate as possible, because if you find the person who created this financial issue for your organization, they may be required to pay you restitution. So you may have to provide the courts with exactly how much money we believe this particular incident cost us, and we’re going to have someone pay us back for all of this time.