CDSA

It’s a phrase you’ve heard ad nauseam over the last two years, and you’re probably going to hear it a lot in 2022 as well: “new normal.”

How else do we wrap our head around all these changes and all so quickly?

Well, for Juliette Kayyem, senior Belfer lecturer in international security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and faculty director of the university’s Homeland Security Project and Security and Global Health Project, she says “new normal” needs to stop. “Now normal” is the way you need to think of your cybersecurity path forward,

Her keynote address — “Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Resiliency in a Post-COVID World” — centered on how amid our collective focus on the pandemic, we’ve lost sight of the security vulnerabilities and hackers who continue to find new ways to get at your personal and corporate information. Evolving risk management and resiliency strategies across organizations and disciplines — which she teaches at Harvard — include her “Five Investments in a Resilient System,” which offers unique and practical lessons for the media and entertainment industry. From the frontlines as a mother of three and a homeland security expert.

The discussed importance of preparedness, and tasked attendees with understanding that while we will always be vulnerable, there’s a lot we can still do to lower our risks. And that begins with looking at what’s already happened.

“How do I come out of the pandemic to a place that seems familiar? Variations of that are the ‘new normal,’” she said, during her the Dec. 16 keynote at the Content Protection Summit event.

“What if instead, in a world of disasters, where threats are coming at us all the time, we have to think of a ‘now normal,’ where today we build our capacity to protect ourselves and respond, but it may be different tomorrow?

“It’s about living in an age where the idea of surprise can be taken out of disaster or disaster management,” Kayyem said. Because disaster presupposes an element of lack of control, the goal should be to remove the idea of surprise, of lack of control, from every security situation … because it’s happened before, she added.

Kayyem, a CNN national security analyst and CEO and co-founder of rideshare industry transparency firm Grip Mobility, has spent more than two decades managing complex policy initiatives and organizing government responses to major crises in both state and federal government. She served as President Obama’s assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security and is the author of “Security Mom,” a memoir that explores the intersection, and commonalities, of her life in homeland security and her life as a mother.

To view her full presentation, click here.

The Content Protection Summit was open to remote attendees worldwide using MESA’s recently introduced metaverse environment, the Rendez.Vu-powered MESAverse, an interactive 3D-world that allows for hybrid live and virtual events.

The event was produced by MESA, presented by IBM Security and Synamedia, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, PacketFabric, archTIS, Code42, INTRUSION, NAGRA, StoneTurn and Vision Media.