While on one hand, cyber is positioned to dramatically facilitate
the process of knowledge discovery and sharing among people, on the
other, companies of all sizes must now secure terabytes and petabytes of
data
Columnists |
by
John Trobough
The term "Cyber 3.0" has been used mostly in reference to the
strategy described by U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn at an
RSA conference. In his Cyber 3.0 strategy, Lynn stresses a five-part
plan as a comprehensive approach to protect critical assets. The plan
involves equipping military networks with active defenses, ensuring
civilian networks are adequately protected, and marshaling the nation's
technological and human resources to maintain its status in cyberspace .
Cyber 3.0 technologies will be the key to enable such protection, and
is achieved when the semantic Web's automated, continuous machine
learning is applied to cyber security and surveillance .
Cyber 3.0 will be the foundation for a future in which machines drive
decision-making. But Cyber 3.0's ability to deliver greater visibility,
control and context have far-reaching implications in our current,
hyper-connected environment, where massive amounts of information move
easily and quickly across people, locations, time, devices and networks.
It is a world where human intervention and intelligence alone simply
can't sift through and analyze information fast enough. Indeed, arming
cyber security organizations with the incisive intelligence afforded by
this machine learning means cyber security incidents are identified and
security policies are enforced before critical assets are compromised.
The Perfect Storm: Confluence of Hyper-Connectivity, Mobility and Big Data
In
order to stress the full weight of the meaning of Cyber 3.0, it is
important to first put the state of our networked world into
perspective. We can start by stating categorically that the Internet is
changing: Access, content, and application creation and consumption are
growing exponentially.
From narrowband to broadband, from kilobits to gigabits, from talking
people to talking things, our networked world is changing forever.
Today, the Internet is hyper-connecting people who are now enjoying
super-fast connectivity anywhere, anytime and via any device. They are
always on and always on the move, roaming seamlessly from network to
network. Mobile platforms and applications only extend this behavior. As
people use a growing collection of devices to stay connected (i.e.,
laptops, tablets, smartphones, televisions), they change the way they
work and collaborate, the way they socialize, the way they communicate,
and the way they conduct business.
Add to this the sheer enormity of digital information and devices
that now connect us: Cisco estimates that by 2015, the amount of data
crossing the Internet every five minutes will be equivalent to the total
size of all movies ever made, and that annual Internet traffic will
reach a zettabyte - roughly 200 times the total size of all words ever
spoken by humans . On a similar note, the number of connected devices
will explode in the next few years, reaching an astonishing 50 billion
by 2020 . By this time, connected devices could even outnumber connected
people by a ratio of 6-to-1 . This interconnectedness indeed presents a
level of productivity and convenience never before seen, but it also
tempts fate: The variety and number of endpoints - so difficult to
manage and secure - invite cyber breaches, and their hyper-connectivity
guarantees the spread of cyber incidents as well as a safe hiding place
for malicious machines and individuals engaged in illegal, dangerous or
otherwise unsavory activities.
Cyber is nonetheless integral to our everyday lives. Anything we do
in the cyber world can be effortlessly shifted across people, locations,
devices and time. While on one hand, cyber is positioned to
dramatically facilitate the process of knowledge discovery and sharing
among people (increasing performance and productivity and enabling
faster interaction), on the other, companies of all sizes must now
secure terabytes and petabytes of data. That data enters and leaves
enterprises at unprecedented rates, and is often stored and accessed
from a range of locations, such as from smartphones and tablets, virtual
servers, or the cloud.
On top of all this, all the aforementioned endpoints have their own
security needs, and the cyber security challenge today lies in how to
control, manage and secure large volumes of data in increasingly
vulnerable and open environments. Specifically, cyber security
organizations need answers to how they can:
• Ensure visibility by keeping pace with the unprecedented and
unpredictable progression of new applications running in their networks
•
Retain control by staying ahead of the bad guys (for a change), who
breach cyber security perimeters to steal invaluable corporate
information or harm critical assets
• Position themselves to better
define and enforce security policies across every aspect of their
network (elements, content and users) to ensure they are aligned with
their mission and gain situational awareness
• Understand context and slash the investigation time and time-to-resolution of a security problem or cyber incident
Unfortunately, cyber security organizations are impeded from
realizing any of these. This is because their current solutions require
human intervention to manually correlate growing, disparate data and
identify and manage all cyber threats. And human beings just don't
scale.
