How automation and augmentation evolve your abilities to protect what matters most

The headlines continue to report data breaches, a rapidly escalating threat environment (thanks largely to the Internet of Things), damaging attacks spanning cyber and physical — and the erosion of privacy. Compounding those issues are a dearth of security resources to fill an overwhelming number of open jobs, the relentless march of new technologies, an ever-expanding regulatory environment, and woefully insufficient budgets.

It’s never been more difficult to be responsible for security.

Whether you’re a dedicated security practitioner, a highly privileged worker, or a line-of-business owner entrusted with protecting the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and safety of your enterprise, we all need help.

Introducing the Digital Twin

What if select individuals within your organization had a virtual likeness that harnessed deep personal knowledge and thought processes across their roles, rights, responsibilities, and relationships? And what if that virtual likeness was constantly vigilant, provided interactive actionable insights, and prioritized work to support optimal decision making? And as capabilities evolve, this virtual likeness increasingly augments and automates mundane aspects of work, freeing precious personal cycles to focus on innovation and transformation. Welcome to the concept of a digital twin.

For security, a digital twin leverages more than just access to resources and subject-matter expertise across disciplines. For each worker, a digital twin assures that work is continuously situationally aware and contextually risk-appropriate. Designed to optimize the overall experience, the oft-opposing forces of security, productivity, and cost are objectively balanced for individual work products and the overall workforce.

(A familiar example would be reminding an executive to tame her risk appetite and explain why the policy she approved is preventing her from pulling up highly sensitive data in a way-too-public location. The digital twin steps in to manage risk, presenting alternatives for her to be productive at that time, while setting a reminder to return to the sensitive work when in a secured physical location.)

Oh, and digital twins aren’t just for individuals, as they can mirror aspects of physical environments that include classrooms, operating theaters, and manufacturing floors. A security-focused environment can immerse the security practitioner in the threat landscape and visually show the impact of proposed policy, technology, and regulatory changes. To extend organizational intelligence, digital twins can be tuned to encourage and enforce cultural aspects that affect security outcomes.

Advances in analytics, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and automation have provided the genesis for digital twins. Let’s get started designing your security superpowers.

A Strategy for Developing Digital Twin Superpowers

Let’s explore the roadmap for leveraging a digital twin for security, from providing basic services to full automation and augmentation.

1) Deliver curated, personalized and prioritized insights — Begin with your digital twin optimizing your online morning routine, searching for information and highlighting relevant events and trends.

  • Intel: What’s going on that’s projected to impact current and planned work. From internal and external sources and services.
  • Threats: Current and evolving conditions, sources, expected consequences, and forecasts for all relevant situations. Includes upstream threats and those from third parties that will impact your ability to deliver.
  • Experience: What to expect throughout your work week, including conditions, time frames, dependencies, constraints, and incidents. Insights on how to plan for the optimal experience and avoid disruptions.

2) Organize, guide, and automate work — Extend your digital twin to interactively optimize across security, productivity and cost.

  • Prioritize efforts that have the most impact and dynamically balance competing priorities
  • Guide work to be situationally risk-appropriate and contextually relevant.
  • Coach desired behaviors with personalized, interactive review and assistance, especially relevant for privacy efforts.
  • Sustain resilience against toxic disruptions and constant distractions, but interrupt when critical.
  • Encourage integration and collaboration across functional disciplines (silos), correlating disparate sources to seek otherwise hidden security information and optimize outcomes.
  • Engage workflows, exceptions, and approvals while documenting decisions as a system of record. Do better at things many of us don’t enjoy or are not good at, such as documenting and objectively reporting.

3) Evolve security through automation and augmentation — Rely on your digital twin to actively share security responsibilities for protecting across personal and enterprise interests.

  • Deliver security outcomes that are consistently programmatic, modeled, tested, repeatable, measurable, and auditable.
  • Dynamically manage the security experience while traveling, across different regulatory environments, and between socio-economic cultures.
  • Extend physical capabilities with robots, IoT, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
  • Guide your security conscience by removing personal motivations and biases while encouraging transparency and objectivity.

Organizations are adopting transformational technologies to take advantage of market opportunities, starting with optimizing the employee experience. They are enabling user access across devices and locations to recruit, retain, and empower talent. Digital twins amplify these efforts to enhance our lives, serving as highly disruptive forces to optimize security, privacy, and compliance outcomes.

The ultimate measure of success will be able to say that it’s never been more rewarding to be responsible for security!

Check out our e-book to learn more about how envisioning a smarter way to work with an intelligent workspace can help you secure and enable your organization with a digital twin. And share your thoughts in the comments, below.