
Security, OR as the latest avatar “Cybersecurity” has always been around. Since the earliest onset of battles, area-capturing; adding defence to existing positions has been practised. All the strategies around the defence of the country have percolated to the defence of the organization and the individual as well. The complexities, budgets, interests of attackers vary, the fundamentals remain the same. Defence, Protection, Cybersecurity keep changing avatars, and therefore the need to always re-invent and stay current.
The keyword here is Re-Invent. It is not a new Invention OR Transformation OR in the more popular form – Innovation. Sure, everything can pass as an Innovation; and that is how the industry is. There are risk patterns and profiles which make us orient ourselves and also re-invent. Let us examine the push triggers which are forcing us to Re-Invent and Re-Think.
- Hazy perimeter borders: We have operated organizations with perimeters and borders. These are comforts and allow for Access Control and Firewalls to be able to control the WWWW (Who, Why, What, When). Add to this Intrusion Prevention and Detection systems that allow us to monitor. With the advent of Work from Anywhere and people preferring flexibility, the perimeter profile has changed. The Cybersecurity space needs to re-invent the controls to focus on WWWW on data and not the perimeter. The latest legislation and controls all focus on country borders, and some data are not allowed to travel beyond borders. Therefore, perimeter controls now need to focus on data travelling around.
- Privacy – the updated beast:: The passing of GDPR heralded a new era in Privacy compliance. Gone were the days when you could try to put this down to just a security breach. A privacy violation today is much more magnified than a cybersecurity breach. Data leaked OR stolen (even if by error) and containing Personal Identifiable Information can bring the organization down in the public media and a stout penalty. GDPR caps penalty at about 4% of the organization's global turnover; which is pretty hefty by itself. There are now additional ecosystems that are impacting business, e.g. Facebook admitting to incurring a loss due to Apple’s privacy ecosystem changes (the Application Tracking Transparency framework). Add to this the various laws coming up in each country, and the addition is a lot for global and local businesses. A Re-Invent into the way Cybersecurity looks at the definition of critical data and adding PII at the top of the list is required.
- Early warnings and Orchestration: The cybersecurity monitoring technologies focused on their ability to evaluate and provide forensic support in the aftermath of an attack. As we moved forward, organizations have re-invented the products to analyse attack patterns and trigger alerts as early as possible on likely attacks happening. The focus now is on the prevention of attacks, and therefore there are more patterns being evaluated, learnt and is moving to a more proactive culture. Human Learning and Machine Learning are fast becoming increasingly required commodities to ensure there is enough intelligence being built into the systems. These systems, however, finally rely on people to analyse, interpret and then repel the attack. Considering an average organization gets attacked (seriously, that is) at least once a day, it is tough to manage. Orchestration, and building an effectively repel playbook is where Cybersecurity needs to Re-Invent and focus its energies.
Every organisation needs Privacy and Security to survive and thrive in today’s digital world. Yet it is beyond the reach of most. Having seen this first hand through his years of consulting, Sameer’s mission is to change this paradigm. He has actualized this via the Arrka platform that empowers organizations for Privacy and Security. Sameer augments the above with various other activities that include a security podcast (for the founder by the founder – FTFBTF), authoring guidances and standards, speaking regularly at multiple forums and mentoring & advising upcoming professionals. In his free time, Sameer loves spending time with family and friends, travel, music and reading.
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