Future activites

Three macro-societal trends have been identified which will influence future activities and impact the socio-economic structure of the UK in both individual and corporate environments.

Always on, always connected device

With the increase of computational power, coupled with a dramatic decrease of manufacturing costs and availability of wireless services, the introduction of ‘smart' appliances and ‘always connected' devices has blossomed.

With this pervasiveness comes the need to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information, which the appliances generate, store or act upon. Personalisation and data sharing are key themes of the UK Government's vision for public service sector reform. As services advance towards an "always on, always connected" environment, individuals expect the services they use to be personal to them.

Resilience and complexity

As we progress towards an always-on always available world, society will become increasingly reliant on services which adopt this approach. As manual alternatives are removed, the ability to operate business process by hand becomes extremely time consuming and expensive and in some instances impossible.

The removal of manual alternatives could also give rise to a technology monoculture, where we no longer have the diversity to repel an attack (benign or malicious) upon services: the inability of technology to perform critical services could harm all aspects of the modern socio-economic UK.

E-crime

Traditionally, information security was seen as the domain of teenage hackers and bored university students releasing viruses onto the Internet.

Today this landscape has evolved into a more sophisticated, commercial and organised threat. Such threats can be characterised by the increase of financially motivated online crimes, the transposition of traditional crime into the online domain and the commoditisation and commercialisation of hacking tools.

The increase in use of digital techniques by criminals has profound implications for both corporations and individuals which demands new and innovative counter-techniques.

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