Building the People Advantage in Cyber Defense

It’s a little over five minutes into the movie  Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World .  The HMS Surprise is sailing through fog while searching for its nemesis, the French privateer ship Acheron, the most advanced naval technology at the time.  A seaman up in the sails calls out to the officer of the watch, Midshipman Hollom, that he hears what he thinks is a bell. Hollom peers through the fog with his looking glass. He thinks he briefly sees something, but he’s no

To help offset the shortage of cyber professionals, we need a map for setting up our  current  people for maximum success. To support this, I introduce the Cyber Success Vector™, a model for that three-dimensional approach. The three factors are: Breadth : ensuring the team member has solid professional basics and work-role-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA). Scope : as the team member moves up in scope of responsibility, newly required KSAs are developed. Depth

Information technology (IT) is first and foremost a human endeavor. It’s a tool, one created by humans, run by humans, and that supports human needs. In cyber, we must focus on the basics, putting the human at the center of the solution. Those basics are: Developing complete, balanced, growth-oriented  leaders  throughout the cyber organization, from executives to individual contributors. Achieving not just coordination or collaboration but  synergy . Infecting the culture wi