CSIS Seminar

Building Cyber Resilience in the "Age of Accelerations"

Abstract

Accelerating technological and social changes are putting businesses, governments, and social compacts under siege everywhere. Interconnected shocks, some from cyberspace, challenge assumptions and best practices. Given the pace of change, cyber resilience is a better approach to countering these than cybersecurity. Security is largely about “locking up and hunkering down,” while resilience is about achieving the organization’s goals under any level of shock, fighting back, and emerging stronger. Resilience includes two parts: operational resilience based on the readiness and agility of networks and systems, and cultural resilience—is the organization willing to fight back? This talk will address ways to become more cyber resilient amidst these accelerations.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Linton Wells II is Executive Advisor to the C4I & Cyber Center in VSE. He focuses on links between policy, technology and decision-making, especially in building resilience and cybersecurity. He has extensive civilian government leadership experience in national security affairs, including service as acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer (CIO), as well as command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) and civil-military relations. From 2010 to 2014 he led the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University. He was a career naval officer. He also advises VSE’s Community Resilience Laboratory. See also