Increasing Cybersecurity Requires Organizations to Collaborate

Dateline: April 13, 2018

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that one ‘feature’ of our business environment is making it possible for the cyber-criminals to be successful:  Our public and private organizations are hesitant to collaborate and work together.  Our competitive business ecosystem, regulations, specialization, and the general nature of business executives to ‘win at all costs’ makes it difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to come together in a meaningful way around anything.  We have to get past that.  In the case of cybersecurity, organizations are hesitant, and rightly so, to share vulnerabilities they have uncovered and information around solutions they have used.  The consequences that results from publicly discussing these issues can bring a company to it’s ‘knees’.  Yet recently Information Week published a blog about Five Key Lessons for Developers from the Spectre and Meltdown Attacks.  This thoughtful piece suggests that it’s time for the tech industry to come together in new ways–sharing information, solutions, and more– to combat the cyber criminals.  In this article,  ISACA Blogger Anna Johansson suggests,

These flaws [in the technology that enabled Meltdown and Spectre to flourish] also make it evident that we need to encourage more collaboration among the different segments of the tech industry. If chipmakers, app makers, hardware manufacturers, operating system developers, and cybersecurity experts all worked together more closely, they might have been able to discover these vulnerabilities years ago. Specialization in the tech industry is important because it allows each branch to become more efficient, and drive further innovation, but because all these different components are forced to interact with each other for a cohesive tech experience, it leaves gaping flaws in the gaps between them.

How can you collaborate with other companies and organizations around cybersecurity solutions?  What would it take for your organization to participate in a collaboration that goes beyond simple breach-related information sharing?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a great weekend!

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