What is your viewpoint on cybersecurity? If you had to provide an analogy of cybersecurity, how would you do it? Today, I’d like to provide the analogy of cybersecurity and its relationship to business, akin to tires on a car speeding down the highway.
Some may view cybersecurity as an airbag or safety restraint. These are tools developed and applied to prevent serious injury to operators and passengers of the vehicle. This assumes a wreck. In similarity, the thought process regarding cybersecurity is to prevent behavior, internally and externally, that assumes an accident. We dress this through the idiom, “It’s not if an attack happens but when.”
My appeal is to shift the perspective, therefore shifting the experience, and therefore strengthening our posture with less resistance and measurably adding value. As opposed to being the restraints only, cybersecurity needs to be the tires, and as professionals, we need to become tire manufacturers.
Tire companies tirelessly explore and build better compounds, manufacturing techniques, and processes to build better tires that adapt to vast conditions while being the smallest yet most crucial contact point for the vehicle to travel. Without the advancements provided through more robust, more pliable, more absorbing compounds of a tire, vehicles would remain encumbered by the very object enabling faster and safer travel. Despite external factors, including debris, deteriorating conditions, eroding infrastructure, and erroneous actions of other drivers, tires have provided smoother, quieter, and more efficient travel.
Cybersecurity should be for our organizations what tires are to a car. Companies are the vehicles with processes and procedures being the safety restraints while people drive them forward transporting solutions and people to desired destinations. We, as cybersecurity professionals, must be like the tires, capable of enabling faster, softer, quieter, and more pleasant travel in an environment rife with potholes, debris, weather, and deteriorating conditions. All the while we instill confidence and ability in the business as the operator to reach their objectives. In this way, cybersecurity is a valuable member and enabler to the business, and everyone is better at it.