This case study was truly fascinating. In a world where majority of the companies pay consultants to digitalize, here we saw Chad paying Parem to help them un-digitalize. Apart from just the food industry, there are a few others that come to mind that need heavy securitization to ensure public safety:
- Military
- The military holds the most advanced and most central technologies and weaponries of a country. If these systems were over-networked and placed on the Internet, billions of hackers would attempt to enter the central information systems and steal most treasured and dangerous access. This may include the ability to launch a nuclear weapon!
- Fortunately, US put a huge amount of effort into securitizing and triple securitizing military technologies and forces. Just like Sara in the case study suggested, majority of the US military information is saved in a internal web that can only be accessed through certain portals and servers. Furthermore, majority of personals are not allowed to use personal devices such as cellphones or laptops within these military compounds. Thus, the military web is almost trying to mimic an offline local storage unit, securing the most key informations
- Energy/Utility
- Energy providers are critical to the functioning of everyone’s day lives today. Thus key information such as operational switches should be taken offline and be closely guarded. Water contamination is also a huge public health risk. The water filtration system checks should be monitored manually as well to ensure that no one can alter the signals within a program and allowing contaminated water to enter drinking pipelines.
- Medical Institutions
- Because medical institutions literally can determine the lives and deaths of people everyday. We need to be absolutely certain that almost all procedural and content checks are double and triple check through both technologies and humans. A hack can cause Mal production of thousands of dangerous vaccines or wrong insertion of drugs to patients, causing national wide health crisis.
- Financial Institutions
- These institutions are large targets of hackers, simply because the hackers can gain a huge fortune if they successful transfer away the money. Thus financial data encryption is crucial these days, yet many banks have fallen down in the face of hackers. Some key information that should be held closely to everyone’s heart is their bank account information. That password should not be floating around the internet in any shape or form. Thus majority of financial institutions won’y have them stored on their end either.
Sara is a critical player in the case study. She definitely challenged the assumed hierarchical structure at her company, skipping multiple levels to direct critique the actions of the CEO. This was super important because as it turns out the hierarchical structure didn’t really exist in the eyes of the CEO, as he only cared for great ideas. If it was not for her comment, Chad would have been in another round of hacker face-off or the new report of public crisis – listeria very soon. The company would have probably lost their branding, credibility and time they could have used to fix their tech system.
