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There have been some large and embarrassing cyber-attacks over the last month or so. So I decided to have a look at Cybersecurity strategies; although this article will not look in detail at issues of network security albeit recognising that it is a critical area, if not the critical area of defence, certainly that’s what network engineers will tell you.
A lot of clever and experienced people have thought very hard about how to do this. Good defence involves standing on the shoulders of giants. The slogan we used while working at Sun Microsystems in their professional services team was to “Innovate, don’t reinvent”. This has the advantages of being cheap[er] to implement and to maintain with high levels of confidence that the solutions will work as well as can be expected.
Joy’s law is the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who argued that, “It’s better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs.” This is a powerful articulation that some of what you need is somewhere else, whether available through standards, services or open source.
