Cybersecurity is approaching oxygen and water on the list of things we need to survive in this crazy world of ours. The threats are very real, whether deployed by governments around the globe or neckbeard hackers in the window booth at the corner coffee shop. The technology we create to make our lives easier now requires extraordinary vigilance, but it’s not the machines we should fear, as science fiction writers originally thought. The biggest threats seem to be the humans manipulating the good technology for bad purposes, and we can never completely isolate ourselves from them. Or can we?

Brave New Perspective

Threats evolve at roughly the same pace as technology, or maybe it’s the other way around, but we still try to adapt security protocols to match industrial age workflows and architecture. If we keep the bug on the other side of the firewall, we can keep our data on this side. The new reality might actually be more, well, virtual.

Instead of cubicles defining our workspace from our other social spaces, security experts are touting the use of Qubes, virtual machines within your hardware that clearly delineate operating spaces, each with its own isolated security infrastructure. It’s called security by compartmentalization, and the hope is that a breach of any one of the virtual machines will not lead to a complete organizational penetration.

Brave New Year

Qubes is just one of many possible and innovative answers to a growing quandary, a philosophy of compartmentalizing data and layering security. ICS can use strategies like these and others to protect the network and data that drive your business, so that you can go boldly and profitably into the new year.