With the rise of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, what threats do customers and suppliers face?

“The old notion that everything valuable within castle walls is safe from malicious forces no longer applies. The modern approach is to segment your computing environment, meaning creating small clusters of trusted computers. If one of these clusters is compromised, your entire operation isn’t endangered. One of the biggest challenges in cyber security is underestimating the cost of cyber security breaches – and neglecting the price of good cyber hygiene.”

How do you see legislation, such as the EU directives NIS2 and CER, impacting cyber security integration and the development of more resilient systems?

“Frameworks that guide responsible decision-making at the management level are a good start, but additional accountability measures are necessary.”

“Then, corporate leaders must be held accountable for providing necessary funding and ensuring the governance needed to achieve desired resilience levels. This executive-level accountability is largely missing today, leading to situations where uninformed executives blame technical staff when catastrophic errors occur.”

How important are open security systems where different technologies and solutions can be seamlessly integrated?

“Open architecture systems are based on the idea that an organisation cannot have enough resources or knowledge to solve an unlimited set of demanding real-world problems. Moreover, there’s no single system that can address all realworld issues.”

“Open architecture is a way to tackle such challenges by allowing those closest to the problem to combine partial solutions into a larger, situation-specific system. This enables them to address enough of the issues quickly and costeffectively.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting many industries, including security. How do you see AI shaping the future of our industry?

“AI stands for Absolute Ignorance. The statistical inference engines perform a mindless mapping of inputs to outputs that often produce seemingly impressive results. We are all too willing to mistake clever guessing for actual thinking.”

“That’s where humans come in. A professor once noted: what humans find difficult; computers solve easily. What humans find easy; computers struggle with.”

“I say, let the computer do the heavy lifting and let humans contribute creativity and judgment. At Genetec, we call this ‘I.A.,’ which stands for Intelligent Automation.”

What are the biggest advantages of bringing together different security systems on a single unified platform? And are there any potential downsides?

“I make a distinction between unified and integrated systems, where unified systems involve greater vendor responsibility.”

“ In merely integrated systems, no component vendor takes responsibility for the system’s overall resilience when any of the subsystems are upgraded, not even the primary system provider. This can lead to costly surprises for the customer.”

“Unified systems offer deeper integration, meaning the main provider makes greater efforts to understand and stitch the subsystems together.”

The cloud has become central to data storage and system management. What are your thoughts on cloud security, and how can companies ensure that their sensitive information remains protected in cloud-based environments?

“The major cloud providers have vast cyber security teams that design their data centres and monitor operations 24/7 against the constant onslaught of cyber attacks and ongoing threats. If all computing needs are handled in the cloud, the attack surface is relatively small, and malicious actors must resort to social engineering or weak passwords to access your data.”

“However, if your system is distributed with parts outside the cloud, the attack surface includes the non-cloud-based components – such as cameras and door controllers.”

Looking ahead, which technological trends or innovations in security do you think will have the greatest impact in the coming years?

“I would point to hybrid solutions that allow us to optimise the placement of computational workloads based on individual organisations’ needs and limitations. Compliance may require certain workloads to be stored in data centres. The cost or availability of bandwidth may motivate keeping large and transient data, like recorded video, on-site.”