It's great to be home! Especially when the last trip was to a place where nothing made any sense, but all of the inhabitants were completely content. The place was called Cyberia. This was an interesting place because the people there spoke a language called “Buzz”. All of their words sounded very interesting and they made people appear way brighter that they actually were in real life! It was a wonderful place, but I'm not certain a lot got accomplished. Btw, it snowed there,…a lot! In Cyberia, business was always being disrupted because of prevalent cyber-attacks. It seemed that each time we were getting close to making progress, the technical folks had to take the systems offline to clean, reload and put them back into service. This happened repeatedly over the course of my visit! I asked why this was the case and the executives complained that they had their technical folks on the case. They bragged about how much their computing staff understood malicious code and knew how to quickly remediate systems and get the company back into its operational state. I asked the executives if they were okay with losing a great deal of money remediating their systems and devoting significant amounts of time away from enabling and facilitating the company's core lines of business? No, they exclaimed! “We have our folks patching the systems and securing our networks to keep the cyber hackers out of networks. This allows us to run our business in the most efficient way possible.” When asked if they understood that much of their profits were being drained because they had not made the linkage of cyber-attacks to their ability to conduct business in an uninterrupted fashion, they were oblivious. These cyber-attacks are a “part of the cost of doing business”, they noted. Cyber threats are always going to be prevalent, but if companies better understood how their technology infrastructure is linked to their ability to execute their core business, they would fare much better than responding to cyber-attacks and exploitation events. Additionally, if executing core business is essential for the company, bring in the experts to handle issues that are outside of the core lines of business. It is much less expensive and the company's technical staff can get back to enabling and facilitating the areas of business that produce revenues. There are lots of places like Cyberia, but careful scrutiny of core and non-core business lines can be the difference between staying in or going out of business. Remember, going out of business is no fun, and it snows a lot in Cyberia!
