Office Document Strategies Blog

For many of us it is hard to imagine that we are now into the third decade of the 'New" century.  If your career started prior to 2000 a lot of your ideas, systems and processes mentally were probably shaped by a very different way of doing things than we now experience.  For those who only know the world of the 21st century the contrasts are not as great but even for them much has changed in the last 20 years.

The Canadian Federal Government has introduced revisions to the Canada Elections Act designed to address concerns about how electronic interference affects future voting.  Given all the controversy about US, European and other jurisdictions being affected by both individual and country sponsored hacking during elections this is a timely and important topic for Canada given the numbers of elections coming over the next couple of years,

Anyone watching the political situation in the US knows that cybercrime has become more than just an economic tool.  The political use of cybercrime is potentially even more critical to the world than the economic impacts but understanding this should not have any of us forget how critical the dollar costs are. 

All of the controversy around the issues of the Russian intervention in the US and other country's elections sometimes covers how important cyber security and the ability of IT networks to be secure is to everyday activity.  If the general media was only focused on the political consequences of hacking of IT systems we would not hear about how some of the daily things we do are affected. 

Some headlines which show Canada is not immune to the issues:

Canadian SMBs hit by ransomware paid out $5.7 million over 12 months: Survey

Interac outlines how it plans to secure Canada's digital identity service

Cyber security a focus of UN Internet governance conference

Canadian firm pays $425,000 to recover from ransomware attack

The costs associated with building systems, acquiring protection software and spending time to keep on top of current threats are all things which we as consumers end up paying for as they get incorporated into the costs of the goods and services which we use.

A recent CNN summary itemizes some of the biggest stories which have occurred including the 145 million accounts from the Equifax hack, the announcement the total of 3 billion Yahoo accounts were hacked in 2013 and closer to home the fact an Ancaster hacker connected to Russians has now pleaded guilty to hacking up to 500 million Yahoo accounts from 2014.

These kinds of events kind of make use glaze over as we figure there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves but we do know that Canadian organizations are forced to spend large amounts to attempt to build protections for us.

We end up having to deal with less convenient systems as things like double authentication security start being applied to our online accounts.  Cumbersome conventions which force us to not be able to directly connect to some financial activity without using fairly difficult security procedures frustrate people and lead them to avoid using electronic systems.

Of course the convenience provided by electronic communications including credit and debit transactions hook most of us into continuing to stay connected and to hope that our information will be held secure by the organizations we buy from.  Every effort which can be made to help secure online transactions (which include most cash register systems) will pay dividends in consumer confidence hopefully.

Looking ahead to 2018 we can only hope that cyber security will remain a high priority for the legitimate IT industry and that break throughs can occur which will frustrate those who seek to illegitimately use electronic data.

Lee K

Photo credit: By ITSveronica (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Since its creation in 2009/10 bitcoin crypto currency has always had a kind of unreal story.  The concept of a globally exchanged currency without a nation as a sponsor or guarantor which is traded by person to person or company to company transactions without a banking system regulator was unreal until it happened.

There can almost never be enough said about how to keep IT networks secure from those who seem bent on creating problems by hacking or stealing information.  The first line of defense for every operation is the password protection used by computer users to login to their workstations and applications. 

On March 9th Google announced its intention to build a Canadian Region Cloud Centre based in Montreal.  This is a significant announcement for Canadian customers and it means that all of the big three hosting services will have Canadian resident facilities to support cloud access from Canada.  AWS and Microsoft already offer this option for businesses who wish to connect their hosting and storage to a Canadian location. 

As the new year starts off it is common to look at what the researchers are saying about the newest trends in IT, technology in general and what may be the flavour of the coming months. 

Any organization that has set out to build a new website after having built its presence over time will acknowledge that creating the revised site can be a difficult and monstrous task.  When that new site is designed to become the online portal to the government of Canada it is easy to see that it will become controversial and will be a major challenge.

Canadian cloud services users have always had to be cautious in their choice of providers if they want to make sure that their data remains in Canada and subject to Canadian legislative jurisdiction.