Focusing on the theme of field-based technologies, I took opportunity to attend a discussion on Flexible Digital Technologies for Resilient Communities hosted by the IET London Network.


Increasingly business are being awoken to the benefits of community interactions. Whilst competitive edge remains valid for all business, there is now an increase seen where competitors are collaborating a lot more than they used to. This builds resilience into any industry as its those people behaviours that defines how successful the industry/community can become. The evening discussions extended out to review concepts such as technology assisted transactions that occur by automation based off community interactions.

For Cyber Security, it was mentioned that understanding human behaviours will be key to making businesses more resilient and a community approach is becoming the norm. This draws parallels to the Security Threat Landscape concept that already exists - Similarly the Threat Landscape was discussed by Benoît Cœuré at the ECB in June 2017 who reviewed Cyber Resilience for pan-European financial market infrastructures. Similarly, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority too created a Cyber Resilience Assessment Framework that takes into account Inter-bank sharing of cyber intelligence. Robert Hall from London First then discussed how company CSR projects are a great tool to help communities progress as they yield long term returns. Behaviour nudging was discussed and GDPR was cited as the perfect example as its initial uptake was slow by most, however, as the deadline looms, the last minutes rush is underway by many organisations who were late to start their review process. 


Speaking with Richard Barnes, former Statutory Deputy Mayor of London, I asked him in terms of cyber security, is Behaviour-Resilience and risk within a system the same thing ? He answered by giving the example of a tech savvy CEO who connects to the office network (maybe on his own personal machine) from his home WiFi without a dedicated VPN..


Mr Barnes answer completely echoes the view of The Central Bank of Ireland whose spearhead review on Thematic Inspection in relation to Cyber Security and Operational Risk in 2015 resulted in them sending a 'Dear CEO' advisory to the boards of investment firms, fund providers and stock brokers to provide a method of Cross-Industry Guidance.


This draws complete parallels to last month's speech given by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France, who discussed that the balance between personal data and big data, is about the balance between segmentation and the sharing of risk-pooling between policyholders, without losing sight of collective values, which again, gives direct reflection on the example given by Mr Barnes.


This event discussed how communities and industries are using technology innovation to promote resiliency through cross-border interactions on simple field-based devices.