The power went out at Intellect HQ last week. No servers, no email, no phones and no coffee machine. The office ground to halt. Although it was nice to see people’s faces rising from their screens and hear the level of natter rise, it was a reminder of the hazards of national reliance on information infrastructure.
The UK is a net-enabled society. Our businesses are technology junkies, becoming ever more reliant on networked infrastructure as the years progress. And rightly so – with the use of technology we are have been able to develop our economy, improve our national health system, our security services and our police systems.
It was only yesterday I was reminded about the perils of national digitalisation whilst sat in an Intellect cyber threats group meeting. When you talk to people working in the security and resilience field, it really does drive home the importance of backing up our national move towards a digital economy with the correct processes and contingency plans to hold the system up when things go wrong.
And things really do go wrong. Hackers can bring down government websites and disrupt access to public services and power outages from manmade or natural disaster can bring businesses to their knees.
In January this year BERR and DCLG released their interim Digital Britain report. Intellect supports the move towards digitalisation and the benefits it can bring to citizens. But this move must not be made blindly – Government must consider that a move towards a digital nation means that appropriate security and resilience measures need to be put into place to ensure that new infrastructure is robust. Loss or denial of that infrastructure, whether intentional or accidental has a number of nasty consequences that can be mitigated with thorough scenario planning and appropriate security and resilience considerations. To be fully effective, security must be considered as an intrinsic part of the process, not simply an afterthought when things go wrong.
p.s title is reference to a Satnogold song about power outages - for a musical accompanyment to your blog reading please feel free to listen here
