A Real Options Pricing Framework for Valuation of Security Professionals

Many organizations have to invest necessarily security technologies and facilities to defense malicious attacks. However, those security technology facilities will not be effective to mitigate damages without the security professionals to operate them correctly. Demonstrating security professional´ value in these areas will, therefore, be crucial. In this paper, we analyze professionals of security as human resources investments using the real options approach, and develop a framework for determining the financial value of information security professionals to prospective protecting organizations assets. The pricing framework gains an understanding of how information security professionals to create value and reveal the optimal investments critical point. The pricing of security professionals is based on a fraction of diminished future malicious attacks to prospective protecting organizations assets. It can help organization decide the timing of the investment, i.e., Decide to purchase or develop security technology facilities and to recruit security professionals now or later.