Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 24

Living in a digitally connected ecosystem of business, societies, and global economies that operate at the speed of light means that the factors and issues that determine how and what we protect are like a living, breathing organism. It is always thinking, consuming, and growing in many different ways. First, the environment you work in is not a controlled and managed architecture of systems and software encased in a protected data center with limited exposure. From the interconnection of data platforms between organizations to the extended components of the Internet, and even through the introduction of self-learning and decision-making software, digital infrastructures and operations are affected by the speed at which the globe is connected. To further complicate these scenarios, the human element cannot be forgotten. Decisions and actions made by humans can readily and starkly change the environment you protect through a limitless number of potential social and physical interactions.

Speed is also a critical element in the pace of change. Technology from a pure business asset perspective is often measured in years. Today, however, through the adaptation of advanced technology for criminal means, some cyberdefensive technologies may have a realistic effectiveness of only less than a year, and in some cases, days. The speed of the threat actor, your own technology environment, and your ability to defend it is entirely predicated on the speed of change. That pace of change also includes the necessary changes to our speed of making decisions. The critical actions of stopping, impeding, disrupting, and responding to cybersecurity risk and events that affect privacy in a digital world force us to make rapid and accurate decisions never required in previous decades. New methods of data acquisition and analysis for decision support are critical aspects of creating these new strategies for success in a digital age.

Finally, speed is a significant financial lever. Beyond the normal cost considerations of time to acquisition, time to deployment, and other accounting mechanisms that manage the total operating cost of programs, projects, and operations, the reality is that the speed of the next generational digital economy and the infrastructures you protect will essentially shorten the lifespan of any given technology or capital investment in your cybersecurity defense architecture. Technology in a normalized information technology portfolio is rationalized into a three- to five-year investment with a depreciation scheme that has been the standard for multiple decades. However, with the advancement of the criminal use of technology, protective and defense technology lifespans have been greatly reduced. Through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and the use of intelligence services, criminals can now identify, recalculate, and react to technology in record time, sometimes reducing the expected lifetime of a cybersecurity asset and investment from years to months or even days.

This chapter focuses on strategies to understand, plan for, and affect the impact of speed on how you think about and execute your responsibilities in defending your business or agency.