A New Culture for a New Year in IT Business Enablement

As new attack vectors and actors continue to come into play the state of affairs for digital assets has never been more sorrowful.

2013 was a wake up year, which plumbed depth of shear incompetence and entrenched legacy thinking in the public exposures and shaming of high profile organizations. 2014 continued the trend by racking up over a Billion personal records compromised from enterprise systems http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/year-hack-billion-records-compromised-2014-n305001 .

2015 has started of very much as business as usual. When will enterprises wake up to the reality that they cannot continue plugging holes in their symbolic dams in response to each and every new threat that appears. To continue the analogy, the concept of holding back the tide is redundant; the network perimeter or bastion approach to digital security protection is an artifact of a bygone era. How many point solutions can an already overstretched IT department effectively maintain let alone competently configure? It does not take long before the solutions themselves become the Achilles heel as patch and configuration management itself becomes another weak link and attack surface.

Technology has evolved to a point where mobility and experience is driving the agenda. End users are demanding a modern user experience and flexibility in their work environments that the traditional ICT playbooks of the past are simply NOT capable of addressing.

The challenge has been cultural for many industries, entrenched ways of working and political investments that see management tiers protecting their process and information fiefdoms with a reluctance to change. Cost is always the big road block thrown across enterprises evolutionary path’s. Cost from the perspective of capital investment as well as change impact on productivity. With the current incumbent CEO/MD tenancy averaging around 3 to 4 years, this means there is little incentive for these industry heavy hitters to risk blotting their cards, so they don’t. They play it safe, or think they do, until that mid-night call that their customer database has just gone public! Hacked due to institutional paralysis to confront the real change that needs to be harnessed, root and branch that can also inject a new business vitality …. The adoption of Activity Based Working. http://www.samsung.com/au/business/resources/activity-based-working-whitepaper.pdf