Forbes Asia — May 2017

MAY 2017 FORBES ASIA | 79

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Real-risk management becomes a challenge in how best to respond and recover from all types of accidents, breakdowns and system failures.

stant. Resilience is key to dealing with those precepts defined above.

We can’t change certain human behaviors. People aren’t perfect, and

they make mistakes. Humans step in mud, trip over their shoes, for-

get their car keys—and click on malicious links in email and on

websites. Security must be human-centric. We can’t have an envi-

ronment where an overabundance of PEN (penetration) testing and

anti-phishing exercises slows productivity to a crawl. We overcome

unhealthy paranoia by making security first and foremost about en-

hancing resilience, and then by making it integrated, transparent,

automatic, efficient, prevention-focused and cost-effective. We ed-

ucate humans, but we make our systems resilient enough to protect

us from our humanness.

If resilience is the starting assumption, real-risk management be-

comes a challenge in how best to respond and recover from all types

of accidents, breakdowns and system failures, both foreseeable and

as yet unimagined, by taking action at the earliest stage and assess-

ing what is preventable next time. With the growing dependence on

information communications technology in our society today, these

lessons become increasingly important for cybersecurity.

William H. Saito, contributor to Forbes.com, is special advisor to the

Cabinet Office for the Government of Japan and vice chairman for

Palo Alto Networks Japan.

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