We’re now getting to that time of year where we pause for reflection, take stock of what we’ve learnt and cast our eyes ahead to the new year with a sense of renewed optimism as to what we can achieve. 2012 can be better than 2011 and every year preceding that. That is the definition of progress.
As a sort of dissent to introspection of 2011 – though we may perhaps reflect on the year in a later post – we wanted to look back at Deloitte’s 2010 Global Financial Services Security Survey, a report we’re confident everyone involved in the information security and risk management industry will have read or at least come across.
The opening paragraph to the report was as strong as introductions go, which we think is worth quoting again, albeit slightly abridged: “The new decade marked a turning point for those of us involved in the information security industry. We now live in an age of cyber warfare. The environment is dangerous and sinister. The children who used to make mischief in their basements are now only bit players and rarely make the news anymore.
“They have been superseded by organised crime, governments and individuals who make computer fraud their full-time business, either for monetary gain or for competitive or technological advantage. Countries now accuse each other of cyber warfare.”
We think they hit the nail on the head there. We are all involved in a sector that has, in some ways, become one of the most important industries in the world, at the forefront of protecting governments and citizens against that wish to either cause harm and/or disruption for whatever reason, whether it is political or vindictive.
With every new development in cyber security comes, it has to be said, equally innovative and ingenious ways of getting around it. Our business is, therefore, in a global context, a 24-hour machine.
As we grow ever dependent on what can be best described as the ‘virtual infrastructure’, the physical world and its parameters represented and engaged with inside of a digital landscape, the need for more professionals and experts to work on ethical hacking and forensics for example, to get people up to an exacting level where they are SC & DV cleared, will become ever pressing.
Like the green industry has been touted as one possibility of getting the UK’s economy – and that of other nations across the world – back on track and booming, so too will the information security sector be instrumental in equipping people with jobs that matter.
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