Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The WWW is perhaps the greatest showcase of how global standards can be created, upheld and developed. In a world of technology where we seem to still have to carry a gamut of leads, cables and chargers because uniform standards haven’t been agreed, it is helpful to know that going online using your laptop, your tablet or smartphone (once designers realise Flash has reached the end of its life) is actually a fairly smooth and simple process. Standards improve the user-experience and they improve the rate at which progress can happen too. If everybody is agreed on certain standards and principles, time previously spent researching and developing those can be better spent on tweaking and improving the customer experience elsewhere.
Back in November 2011 the UK government publised it’s Cyber Security Strategy. Included in it were intentions to encourage industry-led standards and guidance so that businesses and organisations could better manage their risk to their online information. Cyber-security is one of the biggest fears about the internet both for individuals and organisations, so it makes sense to pool resources and ideas to lead to a better understanding and less confusion across the board. Information security is a key business hosting risk so addressing the uncertainty should benefit the economy as a whole.
As a result, the Government this week began a consultation period inviting discussion on how and what a cyber security organisation standard could and should look like. In the published paper Cyber Security Organisational Standards – A call for views and evidence organisations and groups are invited to indicate their interest in submitting evidence in support of their preferred standard by Monday, 8 April 2013. The government will then publish guidance for those submitting bodies by Tuesday, 30 April 2013 with the final date for their submitting evidence then Monday, 14 October 2013.
So a long process but one businesses and experts from all fields should probably be involved in, so if you are interested in having your say make sure you register your initial interest before Monday 8th April to the Cyber Security Team at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (full details in the published paper).
