Sunday, October 11, 2009

The Size of our Security World

I was sent a link from StumbleUpon that referred to a post which showed the relative sizes of planets in our solar system, then compared them to our Sun, and moved onto comparisons with much larger other stars. Surprisingly much larger stars - in fact in the final screen-size graphic our Sun is just represented as a single pixel as compared to the Antares, a red supergiant star in the Milky Way. My 15-year-old daughter was impressed by this, and if you have a 15-year-old, then you can appreciate what a momentous achievement this is.

I started out my post-university life working in cryptography, then I spent a long time in IT Security, then IT Risk and most recently in Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). When I look back at crypto now it seems of similar consequence to the proportions of the Sun and Antares - not merely because my professional interests have changed, but in the vast equation that constitutes ERM, crypto is a variable with minor weighting. Its gravitational force is largely exerted on specialists, and rapidly declines (much faster than the inverse square law) beyond that sphere. It's just a pixel on the football-field sized collage of ERM.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Informative Post and blog. Keep it going.

Unknown said...

thanks