UK government adviser Serge Hook said businesses need to move away from the “impossible” goal of perfect security and work towards cyber resilience.
Organizations of all sizes need to make a change and work to improve cyber hygiene across their supply chains. At the same time, there is a growing role for cooperation between companies in the industry, governments and regulators, creating a need to facilitate better cybersecurity among SMEs.
The industry must act to encourage startups with viable cybersecurity innovations to attract investment and grow.
Huq is Plexal’s Chief Commercial Officer and Director of Innovation Services, and a member of the UK Government’s National Cyber Advisory Board.
In his keynote speech, Huq argued that the economy and society are now completely dependent on the digital ecosystem. “We are at the peak of our digital dependency, everything is connected, everything communicates with everything else,” he said.
“Not only are all businesses digital businesses, but the very nature of technology is changing, and so is the nature of how humans themselves interact with technology. It will be radically different.”
This trend will be further accelerated by developments such as AI, which Huq describes as a technology that “has taken decades to build an overnight success.”
To a less dramatic extent, businesses must also adapt to the shift to cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and remote work. These trends were already underway before the COVID-19 pandemic, but accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hak noted. These pose their own security risks, as businesses rely heavily on technologies that they have no complete control over.
Governments, businesses, and the security industry itself face three key challenges. It is a macroeconomic environment with rising inflation and stagnant growth. Geopolitical risk from the Ukraine conflict. and systematic international competition in the technology industry led by China.
“Technology is a key battlefield, not just from a cyber threat standpoint, but from a broader economic prosperity standpoint,” he said.
This threat can only be addressed by governments working more closely with industry and potentially becoming “first customers” for start-ups with innovative security technologies.
Despite this, Huq remains optimistic.
“I think people are learning the lessons of the past. We believe that we are becoming aware of the fact that it is both a risk to the economy and a risk to prosperity, but recognizing that, we should be optimistic about the future and the benefits that technology will bring. I feel it,” he concludes.
