How many times are the right people in the room? Who are the right people?
Well, that is why we started On The Terrace Tech. We are two women in tech that only figured out that we needed to be in the same meetings by chance — time and time again, we found ourselves dropping the sister hat and putting on advisor hats for each other. Beth once casually mentioned she was getting ready to do research in Australia for the first time and Jo put on her cybersecurity hat to help Beth not break the law, because she had no idea at that time that Sydney had much more stringent data collection rules than she had imagined. It works both ways — We discuss lots of hypothetical scenarios to illicit a response to a problem from work.
I once explained that if you apply cybersecurity after something is already built that you are essentially just wrapping a blanket around it and calling it secure. I am all for sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket to feel better, but that is simply an emotional security and not actual physical security.
Think of this like growing up in a neighborhood where you locked your door all of the time or maybe it locked automatically and then, you moved to the middle of nowhere and did not need to lock your door because literally no one just stops on by. You still lock your door because it keeps your possessions safe because you never had your possessions stolen when you locked your door. Now, flip that scenario - have you ever had your possessions not stolen when you did not lock your door? Everyone has a different combination of experiences that change how they take on new technologies and tools. This is where design is VITAL to the success of cybersecurity.
Users cannot magically adopt technology and tools when they are not created and tested to be user-friendly. SO, how do we make that happen?
We are here to help you with implementing a security-by-design approach in everything from basic password management to the trickiest part of your system, the users, so you can know your investments and efforts are going to stick — and, hopefully, change your security culture from it is a problem for the IT department to a daily effort from every user.