Over the last many months, I have been engaged in great conversations with colleagues about what cyber security will look like when we have billions of things connected in our future hyper-connected IoT world. How do you control and manage cyber security and illegal access when you will have tens of billions of connection points?

Adding to this will be the emergence of Web 3.0 which means uncontrolled/democratized/blockchain-based platforms (vs today’s Web 2.0 world where we use platforms such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc). Web 3.0 will force us to think about cyber security in a totally different way. It’s unlikely we can operate in the Zero-trust realm, as that means we have to deploy security everywhere. Zero Trust in this context is the notion that we trust nothing and everything can be a threat, deployed by the White House and our administration for all agencies.

This is going to force us to think about AI and how to bring cyber closer to the edge, vs central processing and highly closed systems. We also need to think about clusters and how to leverage peer-to-peer to deploy security. For example, think of clusters of ‘things’ acting as police watching over wrongdoing… If there is a security breach near a cluster, a cluster (peer-cluster) can shut off that cluster and stop the breach. So, intelligence (AI) becomes a key part of the cyber security process. All requiring new thinking and new architecture.

Effectively with cluster-to-cluster monitoring and control, we can have billions of nodes (all nodes in effect) policing adjacent nodes and those perhaps farther away. We have to leverage AI in the clusters and nodes – and leverage the networked connections intelligently. Ultimately, in cyber our goal is not to just detect (reactive) but prevent (as early as possible) and stop the threat long before it ever happens. Today our mindset is much more in the ‘reactive’ mode but perhaps the use of nodes and clusters as ‘intelligent’ monitors and protectors can get us into a very new realm of cyber security for the new hyper-connected world. Imagine a world where we don’t just have billions of things, but billions of clusters helping us safeguard our computing environment, our future world!

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