Daily Post 1345
NEW CYBER SECURITY ARCHITECTURE
Necessity is the mother of invention keeps getting proven over and over again in life. The digital world and cyber security has grown at its own pace not necessitated by any necessity to transform. Emergencies for them was meeting the timelines of software development and deployment or doing incident management in case of breach etc. Even Stuxnet and Snowden could not change their pace nor their business model. It was outright commercialisation all the way on the one side and cyber security being regarded as a secondary issue on the other. It was still treated as an outsider to the boardroom issue.
The CISOs tale of woes is all well known. In the meantime, COVID-19 changed it all. The IT infrastructure got into a spin. Work from home was just a jargon earlier which few in the IT world understood. For others it made no sense. All of sudden home became the center of all activity; work, education, financial transactions, fun & frolic and hobbies too. The hackers move where the action is chasing money and data. The IT infrastructure was generally so meticulously created and extended every single time, was extended endlessly and unknowingly in a totally disrupted manner. The gadget, the location, the networking, the support, the training and consequently the security were all in disarray.
But the IT systems had to run. That was the only lifeline in the backdrop of the health crisis and a battle for survival. The threat vectors increased considerably, the work from home added innumerable security issues, even the data center and support having immense challenges. The hacks increased considerably, phishing became as common as fishing, corona/covid 19 apps and websites became swindlers of both data and money and ransomware percentage in the overall hacks reached to 80%. Strangely, all this did not add up to failure. The IT and cyber security systems rose to the occasion rose and kept life as close to normal as it could be. Some amount of comfort level was achieved.
But this is still being treated as temporary. We have to get back to normal is the feeling. The challenge is, if this turns out to be normal, how can cyber security be tackled? The ramshackle ecosystem has to be made secure. Do we have the IT architecture, operations and security blueprint ready if this were to continue as the mainstream IT ecosystem? This is the expertise the world is looking for, all the stakeholders from the telecom companies till the last employee and last user has to chip in to make it happen. First, is how to make him fully aware of the nitty gritty of cyber security.
HEIGHTENED CYBER SECURITY RISK NEEDS A FULLY UPGRADED SYSTEM TO TACKLE IT.
Sanjay Sahay