ThinkTWENTY20

Four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, widely considered one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, withdrew from competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. She cited the need to focus on her personal mental well-being. Anyone who doubts the strength of character that would have taken, simply doesn’t understand the situation.

For the past few years, companies have been gradually moving towards allowing more working at home. With the onset of the pandemic, however, many organizations jumped into the work-at-home model thinking it would be a temporary condition. But a hybrid model evolved that is increasingly being accepted by many as a permanent working condition.

Many organizations are not ready for a proper approach to security in a hybrid environment.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are becoming major components of cybersecurity. They are playing a major role in detecting threats in this age of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Perhaps the most common use of AI is for detection of fraud, scams and botnets. But generally, AI and ML have become essential for effective cybersecurity systems.

On the negative side, AI and ML in the wrong hands are making life difficult for those who want to protect their systems. They are crucial for gathering data in profiling victims, ransomware, deep fakes and other contemporary intrusion/scam techniques. For more on this, click here.

An interesting future development is the advent of quantum computing, which departs from the binary computers we mostly have today. Binary computers store information using bits that can either be 0 or 1. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which can be 0 or 1 or anything in between. Thus the computing power of a quantum computer is vastly greater than that of a binary computer, which means that cybersecurity systems built for binary computers can quickly be overcome by quantum computers. Defense will require the use of quantum computing. While this is not common now, it will be in future. -GDT