Beautiful Security

Chapter 9. Tomorrow’s Security Cogs and Levers

Mark Curphey

Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems that we created with our current patterns of thought.

—Albert Einstein

Information security is not just about technology. It is about people, processes, and technology, in that order—or more accurately, about connecting people, processes, and technology together so that humans and entire systems can make informed decisions. It may at first seem rather odd to start a chapter in a book about the future of security management technology with a statement that puts the role of technology firmly in third place, but I felt it was important to put that stake in the ground to provide context for the rest of this chapter.

This doesn’t mean that I belittle the role of technology in security. I firmly believe that we are at the very beginnings of an information technology revolution that will affect our lives in ways few of us can imagine, let alone predict. It’s easy to dismiss futuristic ideas; many of us still laugh at historical predictions from the 1970s and 1980s portraying a future where self-guided hovercars will whisk us to the office in the mornings and where clunky humanoid robots will mix us cocktails when we get home from work, yet fundamental technological breakthroughs are emerging before our eyes that will spark tomorrow’s technological advances.

One such spark, which feeds my conviction that we are on the cusp of an exponential technology ...