August 27, 2008

Just a Thought: Do you really need it NOW?

The computing environment has enabled us to do business faster than ever before possible in human history. However, keeping pace with the business process speed improvements is the speed at which crooks can steal our identities, our information and our money.

I was reading a news article and I had a brief thought that perhaps the answer to some types of cyber-crime might be to slow down, rather than speed up. Like most thoughts I have, this one requires a good deal of fleshing out, but the seed of the idea is that crooks are looking to break in to an enclosure, remove a resource, and leave as quickly as possible. If a crook has to hang around and expose himself to discovery, he's likely to move on to a quicker target with less risk.

What if we slow down our processing at high-risk processing centers, exposing money movement to larger time windows, requiring customers to hang around (and be subject to random audit) before their transactions are processed? What are some good ways to implement delays and exposure to scrutiny into our data systems? What kind of cost benefit analysis can be done for lost productivity vs. increased security? Just a thought.

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