What happened to standards development — where vendors would collaborate to provide a base level of interoperability between products so end users could pick and choose the best products for them? It seems to be a thing of the past, leading to unavoidable lock-in. Let’s look at some recent examples and the issues they present.
Imagine a world where both nation-states and criminals are able to compromise e-commerce traffic, steal banking details and access your private information at will, and yet at the same time that the criminals themselves and their activities are completely protected because, well, they’re criminals, and they don’t follow the same laws that compromise the privacy of law-abiding citizens. This is the utopia that many governments, law enforcement agencies and now even Interpol want us to live in.
With the current trend towards moving data and services into the cloud, what happens to the old infrastructure that once housed this data? Even with your own personal data set-up, how do you minimise or eliminate the risk that once you have disposed of your equipment, its content has already been securely erased, destroyed or made non-recoverable?
It seems that every day there is yet another case of unethical behaviour related to the technology sector. Whether it is the alleged involvement of the Chinese government with Huawei or a case of an ‘insider threat’ (typically a trusted individual doing something that is ethically and/or legally questionable), bad behaviour appears to be rampant throughout our industry. Intuitively, as IT professionals, we turn to technological solutions to try to solve problems. Configuring (higher levels of) encryption, ensuring logical centralised management and updates are all part of the solution. In a perfect world, this would result in all devices being secure and very little ability for ‘bad actors’ to gain unauthorised access to things that they shouldn’t.
There are two issues that I’d like to provide a quick update on today — the nbn, and the Assistance and Access Bill (2018). As you’re aware, ITPA has spoken strongly on the nbn in the past. We absolutely support the notion that a national broadband network built to deliver access for the nation is a positive concept. It not only allows us to compete on an international stage, but also to deliver critical services and capabilities domestically in an equitable fashion between city and country areas that never would have occurred had the job been left to the private sector. Indeed, some of the arguments against the nbn have been that no private sector company would build such a network due to the risk and lengthy ROI projections attached to it — which is precisely why it needed to …