OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION - Cyberwar-Netwar: Security in the Information Age - page 85

Chapter 5
OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION
Paulo Cardoso do Amaral
Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Rua Padre António Vieira 32, 1070-197 Lisboa, Portugal
Abstract: The cost of information handling is becoming astonishingly low. lnformation and communication
technology will undoubtedly continue to make information ever more abundant to people and
organizations. White-collar growth rates clearly reveal the importance of information as the main
organizational transaction content, more than just transaction support. Consequently, our lives depend
more on information than ever before and this dependence relies on information and communication
technology. After the telephone, the Internet and the mobile phone revolutions, we are entering a new
and more important evolutionary phase: information ubiquity based on mobile communications, both
voice and data. To every individual, information ubiquity will result in the necessity to have immediate
access to information. We assume, quite confidently, that the mobile communications bandwidth will
continue to grow and that mobile devices will also evolve according to our wildest expectations. We
also assume that people and organizations will be able to access information whenever and wherever
necessary. The extraordinary growth of production, treatment, diffusion and circulation of information
creates, therefore, a main technological dependence, in particular from computers and from the Internet.
Because the organizational, social and individual performance is becoming more dependent on
information and information technology, it is crucial to find security approaches that follow
simultaneously technology dependence and the value of its use. Besides, the critical nature of
information and the absolute necessity to prevail, demands total trustworthiness, opportunity, and safety
in real-time. In order to deal with the increasing information value dependability, we propose an
operational security approach for ubiquitous real-time information based on information value.
Key words: Ubiquitous information, technology dependence, information technology, operational security
1. INTRODUCTION
Our work concerns security issues, for actual and future organizations, raised by the
development of technology and its impact on information management. We are interested
in analysing the operational, management, and strategic impact of the new information
management paradigms and supporting security approaches. This paper is presented as a
contribution to the discussion at this workshop around these issues. We intend to
contribute with a vision of information and communication technology evolution in
organizations, its impact on security issues and a framework to tackle the foreseen
difficulties of using ancient methodologies in a new environment. We believe that a real-
time environment deserves a real-time monitoring and immediate tackling of security
issues, with both simple operational and strategic impact.
Security is expensive and the fact that organizations depend more and more on
information and information systems forces the use of more expensive security policies.
It is crucial to devise ways to tackle the need for effective security management
operations and, at the same time, the follow-up and control, in real-time, of these
operations.
Security information management has, therefore, to follow the importance of
information in organizations. For this purpose, we propose a security management model
that can be used in the context of information architectures to model the implementation