Ten or more years in the future, agile organisations who have mastered the security of their systems will have a competitive advantage, and will be able to selectively unlock and extrapolate data for enormous societal and individual benefit. The edges of the organisation will become increasingly less relevant as significant strategic partnerships form between digitised companies. It’s likely, however, that organisations who take the lead in exploring new digital business models and offerings – autonomous vehicle companies, for example – will become targets for increasingly skilled cybercriminals. These organisations will need new, agile strategies for managing and designing secure IT to manage the risks that come with accelerated innovation and evolution.

Significantly secured platforms and APIs will continue to play a major role in securing the exchange of data to enable innovative new business models. Technology decisions will be made from a full-stack mindset, not just around specific components, and data will be in near constant motion as it passes through the many systems analysing it. Other emerging technologies, which could be more widely adopted for security and identity management include: cyborg or machine fingerprints, gestural and behavioural signatures, and biometrics. Much as social networks require onetime granting of access between parties (‘friending’ someone) and then let information flow freely between those trusted parties, machine-centric security (‘trusted devices’) and transparent authentication of users will allow for effective security with less friction than we experience now.

In a world where machines can make decisions together – and grant access to one another – information security will require experts to keep those machines healthy and safe. We’ll also need detectives and researchers who can investigate threats, which may not even involve a human perpetrator, and architects who can design flexible cybersecurity strategies to handle the variety of human and machine actors in the network, without restricting the flow of data which makes everything work.

Digitised transport: driverless cars

Advanced application of digital models in the analogue world means that unprecedented opportunities are possible, and with them comes new types of risk. With a robust security infrastructure, driverless cars promise breakthroughs in automotive safety, speed, and ecological sustainability. As we venture further into an age of mass orchestration of semiautomated or fully autonomous cars, vulnerabilities could expose not only the contents of a parked car that can be remotely unlocked, but core systems like braking, acceleration, and steering. Already, most major automakers have discovered digital security issues in their connected cars, which needed to be patched quickly and remotely.

IoT: connected home

Platforms coming to market today such as Nest and Apple’s HomeKit offer to connect individual devices such as utility meters and appliances to each other, to the cloud, and to a singleuser interface. These platforms enable opportunities for home-sharing, lower security costs, and the potential for savings through the highly coordinated management of energy and other resources. Having your car tell your air conditioner to turn on shortly before you arrive home from work, or gamifying energy use across a neighbourhood by sharing metrics from connected appliances, could bring enormous value to consumers and conservation efforts. However, a home which can be unlocked and relocked remotely via the cloud, with dozens (or hundreds) of virtual access points connecting the home network and any sensitive data it contains to the cloud, will present an entirely new cybersecurity issue for homeowners.