Senetas on Deciphering Information Security Blog

By Stuart Bell

At the recent Cyber Security for Government 2011 conference held at Cockle Bay Wharf in Sydney, where ideas were freely exchanged between presenters and attendees, the general theme from the floor was surprisingly honest: security practitioners felt overwhelmed by customer expectations.

The IQPC-produced event, at which Senetas was a major sponsor, was quite illuminating. Key issues raised during the two-day conference were:

• There are 9 billion devices active on the internet at any one time yet the maximum number of users is 2 billion – there is a lot of automated activity and while that adds to the stress of managing information security, it remains invisible to line management who retain unrealistic expectations
• Business managers react and don’t lead
• Legislative change lags reality by years
• The bad guys out-muscle the good guys in investment dollars, collaboration and willingness to publicise

Whilst introducing my presentation “Circle of Trust”, I did a quick poll of attendees about who would NOT get support to meet the desired Quality and Safety Standards within their organisation. The participants were unanimous – they would all get support. When challenged on the same approach to Security, the participants were unanimous – they felt this would not be supported to the same extent that Quality or Safety would achieve.

I explained in the Senetas presentation how Quality started over 60 years ago, “but it was not until the 70’s where it moved from a cost-based approach to a business differentiator and then matured into just how you do business”.
Safety followed where it was about meeting minimum standards until the business leaders embraced it and used it to differentiate. This quickly drove broad-based adoption that safety was good for business, good for employees and the business community.

Clearly Security is the next wave – and Senetas has a simple twist on an old concept: KISS = Keep It Simply Secure.

In our role working with international governments and their agencies we are well aware of the latest cyber threats; we fully understand how overwhelming this could be to those charged with managing the transmission of confidential and sensitive corporate or personal information around the enterprise, or around the world. 

Organisations must now draw a line in the sand, adopt a zero trust approach and create the future secure environment then migrate trust participants into it. You need to act now whilst your business is still in motion – or it may be too late.

The Senetas position:

• Learn from other enterprise-wide, business and community approaches where organisations had to persist through long periods of change as Quality and Safety became mainstream business enablers.
• Engage the business leaders in setting an objective that is specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound.
• If a breach occurs – act, publish and retain confidence of business partners that operational policy and actions cover this as a normal business event
• A complete approach must embrace people, data and tools – not just the tools.

It’s a business issue not a technology one.

Stuart