All too often information security at the business management level is treated as a simplistic compliance function – just fill in the check lists, make sure the Web sites are ethically hacked each year, complete the entitlement reviews every six months, send out a few awareness fliers, pass the periodic audits and you will do fine. The source of this misconception is pretty obvious. Like Chicken Little, information security officers often find themselves in the unenviable position of telling management they need to spend money on security technology or hire more security personnel for vague risks. Your business may need a more efficient and reliable security patch management system, but when was the last time your business was off-line for several days or suffered a loss because of the failure of the existing system? No business wants its systems to be disrupted for multiple days. But if disasters do not occur that often and you can't show a clear possibility of significant losses, how are you going to convince management to fund a patch management system upgrade? The reaction of management in these situations is often to relegate IS to a compliance, not a risk, function.