The Place of Information Security in the Age of Accelerations
Tech for Life — article 1/4
This series of essays is about the impact of technologies on future life, in particular on the areas of employment, parenting, education and our social interactions. I discuss proposed adaptations to cope with the increased pace of living, the underlying -yet often hidden- complexities of our connected world and the implications on our choices regarding skill development, lifelong learning and digital identity.
- 1 The Place of Information Security in the Age of Accelerations
- 2 A Brief Guide to Parenting your Children’s Digital Identity (and Future)
- 3 Computational Thinking, a Core Topic Starting Elementary School
- 4 Computational Rethinking in the Age of Augmented Intelligence (to appear)
Enter the Age of Accelerations
Modern companies navigate in a world of increasingly fast technological innovation. This requires them to adapt their business processes in order to stay competitive when designing new products or services.
The acceleration of technological innovation is one of the three accelerations identified by scientists during the last two decades, the other two being globalization and climate change. Because these three phenomena are intertwined, in his book Thank You for Being Late, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman refers to our time as the age of accelerations.
A marking impact of entering the age of accelerations is the need for companies (as well as individuals) to adapt to a novel concept of work. Business strategist and author Heather McGowan explains that a consequence is the unbundling of work -or more precisely, complex tasks- that are completely or partially digitized into discrete components that can be performed anywhere in the world. She notes that companies such as UpWork, TaskRabbit, Hourly Nerd “have enabled the production of atomized work.” (See The Adaptation Advantage by Heather E. McGowan, Chris Shipley)
In addition, a 2016 study by Economist Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University has found that 60% of net job growth in the past decade is due to the rise of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers. This is often referred to as “the gig economy”.
A New Concept for Work
The three phenomena discussed so far, i.e. technology acceleration, globalization and the unbundling of work, require companies to change the way they operate, in particular with nurturing innovation out of a workforce made of increasingly mobile employees but also temporary employees, freelancers and outsourced staff.
In his book, Friedman explains that mankind went through two stages of technology changes: the first change was around 2000 with the rise of ubiquitous connectivity and the second change was around 2007 with access to data becoming possible anytime, anywhere with cloud technology. The byproduct is the availability of digital information flows that companies and individuals can tap into at virtually no cost to improve their operations.
In “Digital Globalization : The New Era of Global Flows”, the McKinsey Global Institute defines the transformation as follows: “The rapidly growing flows of international trade and finance that characterized the 20th century have flattened or declined since 2008. Yet globalization is not moving into reverse. Instead digital flows are soaring — transmitting information, ideas, and innovation around the world and broadening participation in the global economy.”
The Place of Information Security in the Digital Flows
The recent increased awareness in cybersecurity in general is emerging from the interest of companies in benefiting from leveraging information flows. Alas, these flows come with a caveat: there’s no inherent guarantee of security. It is clear that there is no promise about the veracity of information carried by these flows. Think of all the fake or distorted news flows used as echo chambers reinforcing confirmation biases.
Even when the source of a flow is verified and depending on its intended use, it might be also necessary to guarantee security properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability, such that the flow can be securely incorporated in a business process whose tasks have been unbundled by the forces of accelerations.
For companies, business outsourcing and more generally open collaboration, is the most common way today to incorporate digital information flows in their operations. A particular and interesting use case is the practice of code development outsourcing as a means to benefit from globalization and the acceleration of technological innovation.
To clearly benefit from flows, a significant challenge for modern companies will be to determine a mechanism to balance the rewards from integration against the risk of exposing trade secrets, confidential information and the potential loss of intellectual property.
Thanks for reading.
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