Collaboration – The secret sauce for cybersecurity

Collaboration is rooted in community

In prehistoric times and in times of war, collaboration was key to survival. The instinct to gather for shared benefit is what a community is at its core. It’s a group of individuals working together with shared goals, understanding that they can achieve more as a group than they could alone. This sense of belonging, trust, and camaraderie, lays the groundwork for collaboration. Over time with new technology and changes in our economy, communities underwent a dramatic transformation. proximity increased; personal connections weakened.

Communication doesn’t equal collaboration

Many have forgotten the true meaning of collaboration, or for selfish reasons have decided to go it alone. Collaboration is not merely about staying in touch. It’s about collective action and output, getting together with a set of shared goals to drive innovation and boost productivity across organizations, groups, skills sets and culture. Of course our enemies hope that we will continue to work in isolation.

Cybersecurity challenges require collaboration and therefore community

To develop cybersecurity talent and business capacity in Canada is no easy task, with a myriad of different approaches across provinces and territories, to different school systems and funding models, changing political parties with conflicting approaches, Canada is a very vulnerable country. From our hospitals, universities to our critical infrastructure, funding and priorities are never enough and ever changing. So how best to develop national collaboration across such a diverse ecosystem?

Making collaboration happen more often

So how do we ensure Canada’s safety as best we can?

Cybersecurity cannot be solved in isolation. Governments alone cannot solve it. Companies can build great product and offer great services, but no company can address the sheer scale of potential threats brought on by our enemies. As well, technological advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other emerging innovations continue to increase solutions and challenges.

By building community across Canada, by bringing together academia, associations like ISACA, BSides, Startup Canada, companies from every industry in Canada, government and the key ingredient, individual members, I believe solutions can be found to make Canada stronger

Developing collaborative solutions to our significant talent challenges, our business ecosystem faltering under the cost challenges and of course our ability to increase cybersecurity awareness in all Canadians no matter their age.

We need to empower all Canadians to take cybersecurity seriously, so that Canada can stand strong and united with the ever-growing threats around us.

Francois Guay is the founder of the Canadian Cybersecurity Network, Canada’s largest technology member network (38k) and the Canadian Cybersecurity Jobs platform (Canada’s only dedicated cybersecurity job portal)