My Favorite Quotes July 11, 2016

“If you never change your mind, why have one?”

- Edward De Bono

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot
read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ”

 - Alvin Toffler

“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” 

 - Alvin Toffler

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” 

- Chinese proverb” 

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”

- Edward De Bono

VOL II. Cyber defense is going to change so much between now and 2021 most won't even recognize it.

So let's continue our journey together.  

Some might say that cyber defenses are nothing but a series of disconnected point solutions and that someone should tie it all together.  

I have thought about this argument a lot.   

If you have studied your CISSP, we can all easily visualize that every technological "thing", human or non-human ....  (person, processor, memory, application, storage, network device, network service) is really an endpoint to some other "thing".  Every "thing" in our tech world, "I/O's" to at least 1 other something else "thing".  From the greatest perspective, every "thing" is essentially connected to every other "thing" and I am not talking about just IoT here.  I believe vendors, service providers, and end users would probably agree with me. 

I can't extract value from continuing arguments that cyber defense is a series of point solutions. I argued that we should remain loyal to our current course, at least until something better comes along. My great great grandfather rode a horse. I drive a car. 

It remains the function of the highest-ranking enterprise security executive or smaller business lead security practitioner, to qualitatively or quantitatively understand their business's risks in cyberspace.  This is been written about and discussed many times.  Unfortunately living risk management has not been implemented or operationalized very many times. 

The industry's current path of layering point solution on top of other point solutions, might be viewed as an unsustainable model. 

The future will not be a linear extrapolation of the present. 

My question for your future is, 

Can you envision an organization that truly understands their cyber risks, and then makes cyber investment decisions continuously and only in proper proportion to the business risk they have agreed to tolerate in advance, during joint collaboration with their executive management?

VOL I. Cyber Defense is going to radically change

VOL I.  Cyber defense is going to change so much between now and 2021, most won't even recognize it. 

So let's start a journey together on that topic. I'll ask you a series of questions, over the next several weeks. My answers are not important, but your's are.
Here we go ....

I think of cloud in perhaps a strange way.  To me a cloud is not just a data center.  To me a cloud is really an app that lets me do something useful using a "behind the curtain" complex value chain, ....... without me having to understand much more than how to use the app.  Most started using my definition of cloud in 2007. And there wasn't a big fuss about cloud.  To the best of its ability at the time, "it just worked".
When customers say to me, "we have our own cloud".   Are they simply saying they have their own data center, or are they using my personal definition of cloud?