Fear Hackers? First invest in an IT security culture change

January 14, 2015 / G C Network / Comments Off

Twitter Feed

EITAGlobal and Cloud Expert Kevin L. Jackson Team To Deliver Business Focused Cloud Computing Training

By G C Network | December 9, 2013

Today I am announcing my partnership with EITAGlobal to produce and deliver a series of business focused training webinars on cloud computing. Headquartered in Fremont, California, EITAGlobal is a continuing professional…

NRRC Video Series – Video 6 : Telos Demonstrates Cloud-based Communications System

By G C Network | December 8, 2013

In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled…

NRRC Video Series – Video 5 : Boeing Ozone Dashboards for Emergency Management

By G C Network | December 7, 2013

Proud To Be Joining Veterans 360 and Cloud for Vets!

By G C Network | December 5, 2013

Today I’m proud and honored to announce my appointment to the Board of Advisors for Veterans 360. Their mission is to provide young, recently-separated combat veterans with a program of…

Take Charge, Lead Change, Do Cloud Right!

By G C Network | December 4, 2013

The theme for next week’s Gartner Data Center conference, “Taking Charge, Leading Change — Your I&O Transformation Can’t Wait”, is a real wake up call for today’s I&O leaders. Gartner’s…

Cloud Computing at the Potomac Officer’s Club

By G C Network | November 27, 2013

Across the Federal IT landscape, terms like “cloud”, “cloud computing” and Software as a service (SaaS) are at the center of a seismic shift by the agencies away from building…

NRRC Video Series – Video 2 : Building the Cloud Infrastructure

By G C Network | November 26, 2013

NRRC Video Series – Video 1 : Introduction and Overview

By G C Network | November 25, 2013

NCOIC To Rollout Open Process for Creating Secure, Hybrid IT Computing Environments

By G C Network | November 20, 2013

Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium to offer capability to organizations that seek to combine traditional and cloud infrastructures for greater efficiency and mission success WASHINGTON-November 19, 2013-Next month, the Network…

So what kind of consultant are you?

By G C Network | November 15, 2013

Yesterday over lunch, a good friend of mine from the Limelight Marketing Group and I started talking about my recent transition. As you can imagine being in the DC metro…

« Previous
1
…
25
26
27
28
29
…
73
Next »

Kevin L.Jackson

With all the news these days about cyberterrorism and hacking the cloud may seem like the last place you would want to put your precious information. Pew Research has even suggested that cyber-attacks are likely to increase. Some 61% of over 1600 security expert respondents to a recent survey said “yes” that a major attack causing widespread harm would occur by 2025,according to the Pew Research study. The cold hard fact, however, is that fear of the cyberterrorist and hackers, while definitely valid, is mostly misplaced. I hold this contrarian view, because when you pull back the curtain on many of the recent breaches, you’ll likely see a mirror!

In a recent case, sensitive data including passwords seem to have been stored in the clear which is against all recommended best practices. There also may have been significant involvement from a company insider. Focusing on application hacks, some of the most devastating have been due to a failure of the application developers to follow some basic best practices for application development. Another important fact is that most of these breaches were not on cloud service providers. These successful attacks were on enterprise built and managed IT infrastructures.

Our failure to protect our information and data is mostly due to our less than focused attitude towards cybersecurity. Policies, procedures and processes play an important part in preventing security incidents but more is needed. Every organizational employee must realize that they could be an entry point for hackers and be aware of their individual actions. IT professionals must follow industry standard best practices for application development, network configuration, system configuration, etc. Many of which have gone through multiple iterations over the years. Everyone must also be proactive in their identification and response to cyber threats. What I am describing is the need for a cultural change.

Creating a risk-conscious and security-aware culture is key to protecting an organization’s information infrastructure and data assets, risk management expert John P. Pironti wrote in 2012 ISACA Journal article. Business leaders must begin viewing information security as a benefit, rather than as an obstacle, and employ threat and vulnerability analysis – rather than fear and doubt – to drive adoption of points of view and controls

So let us first focus on changing our IT security culture. That will give us the edge we need in order to prevail over the cyber underworld. We also must adopt a “trust-but-verify approach to monitoring and oversight of organizational and employee activities”. This would involve the adoption and expansion of automated security control point monitoring and reporting. This, in fact, is a strength of any well designed and implemented cloud computing platform.

(This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. To learn more about tech news and analysis visit Tech Page One. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are our own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.)

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

Posted in Uncategorized

Fear Hackers? First invest in an IT security culture change

Twitter Feed

G C Network

Cloud Computing

Cybersecurity