Focus On Security
by Miki SaxonHow about that. Target, the White House, CIA, FBI and a host of other companies have been hacked and people shrug it off.
The Sony hack was different — a political show of arms.
Last week I commented on the FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez’s focus on security at CES.
Seems she’s not the only one.
According to a survey by Piper Jaffray, security was ranked as the top spending priority for CIOs this year, with a whopping 75% of the respondents saying they would increase spending in 2015.
That’s nearly 20% higher than last year.
It’s about time — if they follow through.
And it looks like they might, since the venture crowd has scented money.
Piper Jaffray’s survey asked only 112 CIOs across eight different industries, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, security seems to be a huge concern for everyone in tech, as some of the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley also picked it as one of their biggest investment areas this year.
That concern is also being driven partly by users waking up to the fact that while companies are happy to take their money they haven’t given much of a damn about keeping their online selves safe, i.e., their information secure.
And that is turning up the heat on the privacy issue as those same companies splice, dice and sell personally identifiable information to enhance their own bottom line.
The dangerous, even lethal, ramifications of hacking are obvious.
Thanks to the hacks of 2014, culminating with Sony, tech’s laissez-faire, “it’s not our problem” attitude towards these dangers seems to be changing.
One can only hope that it changes faster than connectivity grows.
Image credit: markus jakobs