Memos from Quarantine: Welcome to the New Normal

Remember when the biggest news of the day was the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal?

It’s stunning how much our world has changed in just the past 24 hours – and this is something I think we all need to stop to acknowledge. The US financial markets just took their biggest hit since October 1987. The San Francisco Bay Area is essentially on lockdown. Countries worldwide are closing their borders. And the White House now urges people not to gather in groups larger than 10.

On the home front, we’re all dealing with a larger remote workforce than we’ve ever seen. It’s such an impact that Microsoft Teams crashed when Europe logged on the other day. You have team members now who are just waking up to the reality that kids and pets want nothing from you – until you get on an important video conference. You have children home from school who just can’t get their heads around the notion that this isn’t all an extended spring break. And for those of us who are used to jetting around the world all week, deciding where we’re going to dine around Times Square today and near Union Square on Thursday … now we’re eating out of our own cupboards and scheduling walks around our neighborhoods.

I’ll stop there, but the point is: You really can’t move on without stopping to acknowledge that, yes, the world is a very different place than it was a month ago, a week ago, even a day ago. And it’s not going revert anytime soon. This is the start of the new normal.

And yet … as big and as daunting as events in the outside world are right now, what we do in our cybersecurity sector is truly more important than ever.

Think about it:

·       With so many people now working remotely, how important are practices such as identity and access management, zero trust and encryption?

·       With the likelihood that many people will be unable to work at some point during this pandemic, how critical are those business resiliency plans you’ve crafted and tested? And don’t you think all that homework you did on securing multi-cloud environments is now going to pay off?

·       As nature forces us to consider electronic voting in the upcoming presidential election, aren’t you glad we’ve put so much effort into understanding and mitigating nation state threats to our critical infrastructure?

Yes, the world has moved on from the Houston Astros scandal, and the breach du jour might not have the same resonance today that it did a month ago. There are huge news stories vying for our attention, and they are updated by the minute.

But what we do in cybersecurity – the confidentiality, integrity and availability that we all preach and practice – they have never been more important to society.

What YOU do has never been more important. And that, too, needs to be embraced as part of the new normal.

Again, let’s just acknowledge and move on. There’s good work to be done.