Pink Elephant Blog
Cyber Insecurity Comes As Much From People As From Technology
These days I'm doing lots of reading about cyber insecurity - seems like there's a never ending series of security breaches related to IT hitting the news every day. (I won't bore you with the list - you know what I mean, they've been in all the papers!) For the layman is appears that our computer systems are just not robust and resilient enough. But when you scratch below the surface there's more to it than that. We've always been good at blaming the computers when something goes wrong. IT folks seemed to have a free pass for years when their poor planning and lack of testing resulted in downtime. The reason for the outage, or screwed up data, was simply described as "... a computer error ..." But today we're all a bit more knowledgeable and demanding as IT consumers and we won't be fobbed off with that type of excuse anymore. We have our own devices and personal data, and the average person is their own IT organization - from strategist to support officer. However, I think we still put too much emphasis on the power and role of the infrastructure and have not yet fully realized the responsibilities of the users - that's us! Cyber security is as much about human behaviour as it is about the latest security systems and technologies. For example, that smartphone you're carrying around has a ton of security capabilities built into it, but if you leave the device laying around with no passcode to prevent unauthorized access .... well, you don't need me to spell out how all that corporate data can be compromised. This whole human dimension on security is illustrated perfectly by Eugene Spafford, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University when he says ... "Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench." Get the message now? As I said, I'm spending time researching this subject - in preparation for some very important new Pink events later this year. Starting with Pink15 - the 19th Annual IT Service Management Conference in Las Vegas next month - where we will, as usual, address a host of ITSM issues, best practices in Lean IT, and more. We'll also be introducing news about our inaugural 1st Annual Pink Elephant Cyber Resilience Summits (in Washington D.C. and London, UK) in June. There'll be some preliminary Cyber Resilience sessions at Pink15 to whet our appetite, including some advanced news of the new Cyber Resilience Best Practice from Axelos. I hope to see you in Las Vegas! Meanwhile, think about what you can do to keep your data and infrastructure safe. And when you hear news of the next high profile security breach, try to resist the temptation to giggle. Instead, think to yourself "How can I be sure that won't happen to us?" You might not know what else to do to be more cyber secure, but you can always be more cyber resilient.
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home | March 30, 2015 at 5:54am