20 December 2005

Keep infosec special says Standard Chartered security leader

Brian McKenna

John Meakin, Group Head of Information Security at Standard Chartered, told an audience of leading information security professionals yesterday to resist a trend to “lump infosec in with other disciplines”.

In a talk on the future of the profession given at the Hewlett-Packard annual colloquium on information security at Royal Holloway College, University of London, Dr Meakin, a former Cambridge research physicist, spoke against a "pressure to dissolve that which is special about information security”.

"Dodo or eagle?” he asked. “Are we to soar, aloof but aware? Or will we continue to be weighed down by our own strangeness?”

He said he saw a tendency to lump infosec in with “the disciplines of risk, and if we do that we risk washing out what is useful about our own discipline”.

Meakin also argued that while there has been progress, on the supplier side, in terms of technological maturity, since 1970, the “rate of innovation over the past few years has been variable, and in decline”.

"Why do I say that? That’s just the way it feels in business”, he said.

He called for better integration of security technologies at a high level. “We need to integrate better, but there is nothing new coming along”.

In the face of this lack of innovation, he urged information security professionals to be bold. “All IT security managers touch all of IT. Who else does that – apart from CIOs or CTOs?”

Infosec professionals need to change mindset, he said, citing the Jericho Forum as an example of how this is being done. “It’s the wrong approach to say of a new business process, ‘you can’t do that, it’s not securable’”.

The profession needed, he said, to orient itself to occupy a sweet spot between business skills on the one hand, and technical skills on the other – neglecting neither.

The Standard Chartered security chief was speaking at an event that forwarded the creation of a new ‘Institute for Information Security Professionals’, officially launching in January.

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