Digital security? No such thing, says Gartner

Good headline eh? A beat up? Don't be so sure. Gartner has just released its 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, claiming that it "maps the journey to digital business." It puts digital security at the very start of that journey and on a slow road to the destination.

This journey is important. All the analysts are saying that businesses must become digital to survive. I spent most of yesterday at Forrester's CIO Summit in Sydney at which that message was driven home time and again.

It's neatly summed up in the introduction to a new Forrester report The State Of Digital Business In Asia Pacific In 2014, due for release later this month. "Regional CIOs must incorporate digital as a core technology imperative. CIOs who ignore the impact of digital disruption do so at their own peril. The only way to weather dynamic industry changes is to incorporate systems that help your organisation win, serve, and retain customers."

I'm sure you're familiar with the Hype Cycle. A new technology starts with an innovation trigger, rises relatively rapidly to the 'peak of inflated expectations' before descending equally rapidly to the 'trough of disillusionment' and then, assuming it survives rises relatively slowly up the 'slope of enlightenment' to the 'plateau of productivity'.

There are close to 50 emerging technologies spread across this hype cycle, each individually coded with Gartner's estimate of how long that technology will take to reach the plateau of productivity.

The one that caught my eye is right at the start of the cycle with a 5 to 10 year time frame to productivity. It's labelled 'digital security'. Surely not? The issues with security are well publicised but it is an established and generally successful technology, if you take it to be a blanket term covering the whole gamut of techniques and technologies used to secure data in the digital world. That at least is how Wikipedia defines it (although that article is flagged as having multiple issues).

Without access to Gartner's full report on the hype cycle it's hard to know exactly what Gartner means by 'digital security' but references in Gartner blogs etc suggest it to be a fairy general umbrella term.

And indeed it seems that Gartner is forecasting the end of security as we know it. In Gartner's top 10 predictions for 2014 there is one slide (slide 13) which predicts that: "By 2020 enterprises and governments will fail to protect 75 percent of sensitive data [and] will declassify and grant broad/public access to it."

It goes on to say: "Enterprises and government should accept that sharing many seemingly sensitive data is neither dangerous or unprofitable, politically and economically." It argues that the growth of data will exceed protective mechanisms and that the best form of protection is having nothing to protect.

Trouble is the same technologies than can be used exfiltrate data can be used to infiltrate and disrupt systems that do much more than store and process data: systems that control things, things like electricity supply, lifts, life support systems etc, etc.

Another of Gartner's 2014 predictions is that "by 2024 at least 10 percent of activities potentially injurious to human life will require mandatory use of a non-overidable smart system."

Non-overidable of course does not mean secure and non-hackable. But hey, Gartner reckons digital security will reach have reached the plateau of productivity by then so we can all relax.