Does cyber security kill innovation?

Cyber security is a continuous procedure. And there are no shortcuts and no standard protocols to follow. It’s a continuous evolution of learning new tricks and tactics. It takes a lot of hard work and preparation to establish. Even if you manage to establish a proper strategy to secure your workplace or home, there is no guarantee for the safety of your network or data, because the cyber criminals and their methods are always evolving. So, it is natural to think that defending an invisible enemy is slowing us down from new innovations and experiments. But before we make our judgement, let’s analyse the current scenario.

The beginning of a new era

After the transformation from physical records to digital records, the world has become smaller and borderless. We have experienced an escalation in economy distribution and witnessed the emergence of a single marketplace, the internet. Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates said that “The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow”. Yes, World Wide Web revolutionized human lives in many aspects. It was like a new playground for humanity. The Internet brought the whole world under one single umbrella.

The transformation

At the beginning, like every child we were also busy at setting up our home and identity to establish our presence in the newly emerged virtual space. This was the golden era of the internet, we have been introduced to many breakthrough inventions like ‘Google’, Facebook, e-commerce and many other. We made tremendous progress in many fields of the internet in the following years and there we encountered a difference in ideologies. The internet was turning into a common place where everyone resides and strive for success.

The emergence of cyber security

Yes, the internet is a common place where anything is possible if you know your way to achieving it. We realized that no place is a fortress and no data is secure. The care-free world which we knew once has changed to something very unpredictable and unstable. That’s the way of natural progress, we were at our adolescent ages and we made the most of it by unleashing our creativity and built a world full of opportunities. As we have grown up and understood the need for a safe and secure space where you and your co-humans identities can exist peacefully. And there we saw the emergence of cyber security. When the cyber criminals are inventing new tools and developing new methods to compromise network infrastructure, cyber security needs to emerge as a field for innovation.

We must consider cyber security as one of the top priorities, and it is a field which requires a massive amount of creativity. Because the cyber criminals have the luxury of being unpredictable and anonymous. What we need is an effort from all directions starting from the development phase to the implementation.

Cyber security is not a process, but an idea. An idea to spread throughout all aspects, including developers, project managers, network administrators and the end-user. The developers must design the environment with strong and unbreakable codes. The project managers must coordinate the implementation of the idea of ‘security’. It is network admin’s job is to safeguard the surroundings from an intruder. And finally, the end-user should be able to protect his devices from becoming a doorway to cyber criminals. Cyber security is not the responsibility of only cyber security experts, not anymore. We have passed that stage, now it’s everyone’s responsibility. Instead of viewing it as a responsibility, we can see it as an opportunity to innovate new methods to withhold our privacy and to ensure security.

So, cybersecurity never withholds creativity, instead, it embraces it into a whole new level. To a level in which everyone can innovate and contribute.