6clicks monthly wrap – September 2020

This last month, our dependency on technology to enable new ways of working was made clearer (even if it didn’t need to be) when a key video conferencing service became unavailable for several hours. Without the ability to connect in person as often as we previously did, the availability of videoconferencing has become essential to business and government operations, including education and elements of healthcare delivery for a large part of this year. Despite cloud computing offering resiliency in a lot of cases, always be on the lookout for potential single points of failure in your operations and be prepared with alternatives (or just be patient if you can be). 

Technology has long been a battlefield not just to keep the lights on but also competitively. Not just a race between technology companies looking to provide the latest and greatest technologies and stay ahead of the competition, but also between technology companies and government. Technology companies now store and control access to some of the largest data sets of personal information, larger than we could have ever imagined (except perhaps for one guy and his book). Governments may request access for legitimate purposes and even seek to collect steal it from foreign competition to serve their own developing industrial and military capabilities.

We covered some of the recent cyber espionage and cyber crime activity this month on the Nine Radio Network and on TickerTV. Some activities like cyber crime are more clearly “bad”, and with others like cyber espionage it often depends on whether you are the victor or the loser. Increasingly though, it is hard to claim you can do it but others can’t. With all kinds of cyber activity in the spotlight, it is a good time to revisit our practices at all levels and strive for improvement. We’re steadily building a community looking to improve cyber, risk and compliance practices and that was seen this month with our coverage on the #FinCENFiles here and here. 

It’s funny how things change, and what was once acceptable no longer is. Like waiting more than 10 minutes for a taxi or just a few hours of computer system downtime.