David Lacey's IT Security Blog

I've just got back from several days in Madeira, attending and speaking at an exclusive Pitney Bowes conference on "The New Media Landscape". I'd advise all security practitioners to aim to attend events on subjects other than information security. You can learn a lot more, and it opens up new dimensions, which is essential to tackle a solution space that is increasingly becoming an inter-disciplinary one.

I picked up many new learning points about marketing communications, customer experiences, Generation Y, trust and privacy.  These are all important points for understanding the new type of people-focused security we need for the future.  

Key learning points for me were the shift from "push" to "pull" in communications, and the need for greater emotional engagement, especially with Gen Y staff and customers. We need to move from an anonymous "sell" approach for our products to a deeper, more personalised "pull" relationship with our customers.

We can't build trust and good security behaviour through ad hoc, one-way communications of corporate dogma. We need a new, more sophisticated approach. All security practitioners should start thinking about this now, and assigning much bigger budgets to future security awareness initiatives.