Editorial July/August 2021

A Note from the Editor

I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Jackie Damrau and Ben Woelk were interested in guest editing an issue about cybersecurity. I spent several years in the industry, and I’m pleased to see how much security awareness is expanding out into other aspects of business.

It’s amazing to see how much the industry has shifted in the past two decades. When I first went to work for McAfee, we talked about the vulnerability of data sitting on the hard drives of individual laptops. In February 2020 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Juniper Networks estimated that this year, 83 percent of enterprise workloads would be cloud-based. I suspect that the number turned out to be even higher after a year of remote work. That’s a lot of content to secure, and it’s making cybersecurity a hotter industry than ever.

In their article, “Beyond the Weakest Link,” (page 29), Valerie Vogel and Joanna Grama talk about how this sudden shift has caused the security industry to drastically reconsider how we talk about information security practices. “[It] has heightened the need to make sure that users are informed about and empowered to implement information security practices in their remote working environments because technical controls can’t always work in an environment not managed by a central IT organization.”

But how can we educate people on best practices in ways that truly resonate? In a survey conducted by Dr. Liz Herman, one respondent noted that the current pandemic can and should reshape cybersecurity training. “Show how it impacts people at home as well as work. That way they can have good habits that carry back.” You can read more about it in “Developing Engaging Security Training” on page 24.

I hope that this issue gives you new ideas for how to include cybersecurity best practices in your content development. If there are other industries that you’d like us to profile in Intercom, send me a message at intercom-editor@stc.org. I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Alisa Bonsignore
(she/her)