Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 8

“The most fundamental forces of cybersecurity are speed and connectivity. Our solutions must support and leverage these forces.”

Phil Quade, Fortinet

“Embracing cybersecurity as a science can be an incredibly powerful and effective way to underpin innovation.”

Phil Quade, Fortinet

Humankind experiences some of its greatest disappointments and disasters when we fail to acknowledge the fundamentals of physics and chemistry. As we solve problems and improve technology, we must work with, not against, the foundation of the laws of mass, force, energy, and chemical reactions—laws that began with the cosmic big bang.

Like the physical world, cybersecurity has its own set of fundamentals: speed and connectivity. When organizations ignore these fundamentals, distracted by sophisticated marketing or new products, we suffer the consequences. We end up with solutions that solve only part of the problem or that simply stop working (or stop us from working when put to the test of real-world conditions).

That's partly because, to date, cybersecurity has been treated as a cost of doing business, as opposed to a foundational set of primitives and rules that are leveraged to achieve greater things. To build a cybersecurity foundation that will work now and continue to work in a world exponentially faster and more connected, we must start treating cybersecurity more like a science. We must understand its fundamental elements and how they interact.

The early Internet, constructed decades ago to serve a small, tight-knit and primarily academic community, was built upon principles of game-changing speed and a deep understanding of the importance of connectivity. Security and privacy were not needed for that first small group of trusted users and thus were not part of the original design requirements. Although security and privacy have demonstrated their importance in today's blisteringly fast, global network, they have not kept up as the Internet has matured.

While we are exponentially more connected than at any other time in history, with nearly instantaneously accessible information at our fingertips, the cyberadversaries—not the defenders—are the ones who have mastered speed and connectivity to their advantage. Speed and connectivity serve us well as communication building blocks, but too often have failed us in cybersecurity, because we have failed to establish the foundation of cybersecurity upon those fundamental elements.

In a hypercompetitive business landscape, not only do cybersecurity fundamentals protect you and make you a much less attractive target to bad actors, but they also cast a halo of protection across all the individuals and organizations to which you are connected.

When we build our cybersecurity based on a complete understanding of fundamental elements and how they can work together, we can inspire and encourage scientific revolutions and evolutions in cybersecurity that will make us much better off.

We are on the verge of a new understanding of a basic element of human society. Just as the world has understood that economic security has been highly dependent on a stable flow of fossil fuels and that national security is dependent on safeguards for nuclear weapons, today we understand that, in our hyperconnected world, there is no global security without understanding and mastering the science of cybersecurity.

But the real historical analogy of cybersecurity, the story of the digital big bang, starts much earlier. Let's rewind nearly 14 billion years to the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe as we understand it today.

“The good thing about science is that it is true whether you believe it or not. That's why it works.”

—Neil deGrasse Tyson