Securing today’s connected enterprise is a race across many terrains where we are often unsure or unaware of what lies ahead and who or where our opponents really are. So says the US-based security management association ASIS, whose European annual conference, in Rotterdam in 2018, takes the theme ‘From risk to resilience‘. The event organisers argue that boundaries continue to erode between the physical and cyber worlds.
Thinking in security management is changing to reflect both how business is changing – using new tools, that among other things allow more complex and far-reaching supply chains – and the need for timely action to keep a business resilient.
An exhibitor at the Professional Security series of events Security TWENTY (ST) last year reflected that in the ‘old days’ – yet well within working memory – before mobile phones, if you attended an exhibition, whether as exhibitor or visitor, as telephones (and faxes) were on fixed lines, you were not in contact with the office if you were physically away. That did not necessarily put you at a business disadvantage, however; because everybody else was in the same boat.
Likewise, just as email and mobile devices have speeded up business – whereas we would wait days for a reply to a business letter, because that was the same for all, now we may become impatient in hours or minutes – so criminals are using the same devices, to carry out malicious acts; or insiders, even by accident, are creating problems, if for example they reply in good faith to an email purporting to be from the CEO asking for a money transfer, which in fact is a case of ‘CEO fraud’, identified by the official UK reporting centre Action Fraud as a risk for businesses of all sizes.
Security management and disaster recovery
As the ASIS Europe slogan suggests, resilience – arguably another way of saying business continuity and disaster recovery – is to do with security management, as part of the wider effort to keep a business resilient, whether against acts of terror, extreme weather or risks to reputation. As an example of how security management fits into the need for wider resilience, the opening speaker at the annual two-day Business Continuity Institute (BCI) conference and exhibition, BCI World, on Tuesday, November 7 is Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who until February was Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Picture by Mark Rowe: Canary Wharf, London Docklands.
