Running head: CYBERSECURITY TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC PLAN 1

Cybersecurity Technology Strategic Plan

Samba Dione

Cybersecurity Technology Strategic Plan

Introduction

Acme Documents and Graphics is an industry leading media company that delivers

information and graphics of the highest quality. Acme has a diverse portfolio serving clients

across the country. Safeguarding our media is of upmost importance to our bottom line. Acme

senior executives have tasked our team of information security officers to plan our companies’

future of mass connectivity and data loss prevention technology. This plan will address the

devices and technologies, goals and objectives, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

(SWOT), integration and implementation issues, and people, process, and data governance

issues.

Devices and Technologies

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a growing concern for information technology (IT) team

leaders in both the private and public sectors. Tessian’s The State of DLP 2020 revealed that

84% of IT leaders said “DLP is more challenging when their workforce is working remotely
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(Tessian, 2020).” However, many companies, organizations, schools, and government offices

are allowing their employees to work from home and mostly utilizing their own devices because

of the COVID-19 pandemic. DLP has evolved from an option to a requirement. The challenging

part is that DLP is not a product or a service that a company can buy and pay for it. DLP is a

strategic technology plan. Its success depends on methodology and execution of team work.

More precisely, Cisco described DLP as “a set of technologies, products, and techniques that are

designed to stop sensitive information from leaving an organization” (Cisco, n.d.). Moreover, it

emphasized that DLP strategies must include solutions that monitor for, detect, and block the

unauthorized flow of information (Cisco, n.d.).

Like many other organizations, Acme allows our employees to work from home and

remotely connect to the network to conduct business. The following are the devices and

technologies most appropriate for data loss prevention for adhering to the company's business

mission and future success.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). IPv4 is the fourth version of the Internet protocol.

IPv4 uses a 32-bit address scheme allowing it to store 2^32 IP addresses (Ellingwood, 2014).

Although the combination of unique 32-bit logical address can be set up to 4.3 million unique IP

addresses, that is not enough to accommodate all of the current connected devices. As IPv4

addresses are about to run out, IPv6 deployment is the current solution for the long term growth

of internet. IPv6 is a128-bit IP address which supports 2^128 internet addresses in total

(Ellingwood, 2014). In other words, IPv6 allows up to 2,128 possible combination of nodes or

addresses (Ellingwood, 2014). In a simple term, it means IPv6 provides the address pool around

340 trillion (3.4 x1038).

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Along with offering an abundant list of new addresses, IPv6 also provides a range of

benefits for security, integrity, and performance. It can run end-to-end encryption. Its protocol

security is mandatory while IPv4 is optional. IPv6 migration is a question of when, not if.

Services like Google and Facebook are currently available via IPv6.

Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a catch-all term for all internet-connected devices in

which each have an IP address. According to Oracle (n.d.), “Internet of Things (IoT) describes

the network of physical objects or things that are embedded with sensors, software, and other

technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems

over the internet.”

How does IoT work? In a short version, it is explained as the following (Fruhlinger,

2020):

- First, IoT devices gather data and send it through the Internet for processing.

- Second, the data is saved and analyzed centrally at a corporate data center. The analytic

algorithms at the corporate data center is the brain of all IoT devices.

- Third, instructions based on analysis are returned to the IoT devices.

Big Data Analytics. Big data analytics is a process which involves examining and

analyzing the data to discover patterns, correlations, insights, and trends, etc. For example, by

applying customer analytics to big data, a company can gain insights or draw conclusions about

what their customers like or don’t like. The company can make better informed data driven

decisions on what product to make in order to increase revenues and profits.

Big Data Integrity. If big data is important to a company, then big data integrity is even

more important to maintain and safeguard. If the data is corrupted or a breach occurs that
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compromised the data, the consequence to a company can be productivity disruption or loss of

customer loyalty.

Blockchain. Our IT team is considering adopting blockchain technology as part of our

DLP plan as it has a positive impact on data security. Blockchain offers encryption and

validation of data. “Blockchain platform ensures that [our] data is encrypted, which means that

modification in data is difficult” (Palavesh, 2018). It is also very unique in a way that it is

decentralized and distributed ledgers are displayed across peer-to-peer networks so that every

computer or computing device saves a complete copy of the data. As a signature of a document

or file is saved on the Blockchain, if someone changes a record, the signature is rendered invalid

(Palavesh, 2018). As the writer’s believe, it is difficult to hack Blockchain because it is a chain

of digital blocks that contain records of transactions (Palavesh, 2018).

Data Masking. Data masking is altering data from its original state to protect it. There

are various techniques for masking data at-rest. A common technique is to replace the

confidential data with either fictitious or obscured data. An example of masking the data is to

replace actual social security numbers with some make-up numbers.

Data Tokenization. It is a process of replacing sensitive data with unique identification

data while retaining all the essential information about the data. This tokenization technology is

commonly used by the credit/or debit card processing companies. In the Card Payment Industry

Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Guideline, the tokenization technology is described as it is “a

process by which the primary account number (PAN) is replaced with surrogate value called a

token; de-tokenization is the reverse process of redeeming a token for its associated PAN value

(PCI DSS, 2011).

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In our company’s strategic technology plans for DLP, we plan to implement IPv6,

blockchain, IoT, and big data analytic technologies. The adoption of IPv6 technology will

significantly reduce man-in-the-middle attacks. Blockchain technology is the ideal way to store

our media content and to prevent it from being hacked as it is secured and reliable. Leveraging

the exponential growth of IoT devices in the coming years, our media company will collect

audience data from streaming devices such as smart TV, tablets, laptops, and smart phones. The

audiences of IoT device will have a choice to opt-in and allow the company to use that data to

help improve their experience. Big data, gathered from IoT, and our proprietary analytic

algorithms will help our company produce media contents based on audience-driven data.

Goals and Objectives

Acme’s mission is to reliably distribute digital content. Protecting our data in its many

digital formats is of paramount importance to us. Our strategic plan has several goals and

objectives that will better serve our customers and grow our business. These goals and objectives

include ensuring data integrity, improving the reliability of our digital data delivery, implement

peer-to-peer collection of audience data, and big data analysis to optimize our customers’

experience.

IPv6. Switching to IPv6 will fast track Acme to achieving many of our goals and

objectives by adding several security benefits IPv6 offers over IPv4. The most notable of these

benefits is the native implementation of end-to-end encryption making man-in-the-middle attacks

more difficult. Additionally, IPv6 offers more secure name resolution which, among other things,

will make it increasingly difficult to redirect traffic (Sophos, n.d.). IPv6 will propel us to the

future of IP routing.
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Implementing IPv6 at Acme will require an Internet Service Provider (ISP), network

routers, and operating systems capable of providing IPv6 services. Many ISPs and our Windows

personal computers already support IPv6. We will have to upgrade our entire backbone of

network devices.

Blockchain. Implementing blockchain offers the opportunity to improve the security of

our digital content. It allows Acme to secure our data across multiple devices and prevents

unauthorized users from making illegitimate modifications. Blockchaining distributes data

storage dividing large files into chunks so our data is decentralized, encrypted, and cross-

checked (Raturi, 2020).

Employing blockchain data storage will require a file storage application that employs

blockchain as its underlying storage technique. Multiple vendors offer commercially available

solutions. Any of these applications will rely on a cloud storage infrastructure. This will

transition Acme from a legacy, centralized file server implementation to cloud based

decentralized storage.

IoT & big data analytics. Acme will use an IoT architecture to harvest customer’s

media preferences from smart TVs, tablets, laptops, and smart phones. We will collect this data

from their personal devices, store it in the cloud, and then apply big data analytics to the data to

personalize content delivery back to the customer. The combination of these technologies will

improve the customer experience and set Acme apart employing leading edge technologies to

improve services for our customers.

To successfully implement these technologies Acme will first be required to develop,

maintain and deploy a custom mobile application for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms

and that will reside on our customers devices. Next we will need to implement a cloud storage
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architecture to store the data gathered from the endpoints. The final step requires our data

scientists to implement custom analytics to the data to identify customer preferences. This will

be a new implementation, not replacing any existing infrastructure at Acme.

SWOT Analysis

do a SWOT analysis of those same technologies

Step 4: Prepare a SWOT Analysis Table

You've identified the technologies and devices, and listed the goals and objectives for their

use in the organization. In this step, you will justify adding these devices and technologies

to the network infrastructure.

In order to do this, perform a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT)

analysis of each device/technology being introduced into the infrastructure. A SWOT

analysis is a framework that allows you to identify internal and external factors that can

affect the implementation of new technology. Such a process can be helpful for decision

making and strategic planning.

Look at internal and external factors that could influence the successful introduction with

respect to the company specific business model and operations. Internal factors are the

strengths and weaknesses you found. External factors are the opportunities and threats

identified during the SWOT analysis. Determine what these are. Address the following

questions in your discussion:

 How do they influence the operation and maintenance of the network?

 What can be done to overcome these factors?

 Summarize it on 1-2 powerpoint slides

 Include references.
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