After his talk proper to the Security Institute webinar this morning, the former senior UK government security man Paul Martin answered questions from the floor. The webinar host, Institute chief exec Rick Mounfield, read out a question from Alan Cain; what if another crisis were to happen during covid-19? Such as, a big outage while so many people are working from home?
Paul Martin replied that it was a ‘dangerous mindset’ that only one bad thing happens at a time:”Obviously that isn’t true.” The covid-19 crisis has not materially altered the likelihood of some other crisis; in fact, he added, in some ways it might have increased one or two. And if you were to get multiple crises, because of society’s complex systems, you may find more than the damage done by one crisis plus the damage done by a second; the one may exacerbate the other.
Paul Martin remarked that he is working from home, and relying on broadband; if broadband went down, he would not be able to work; and such an outage of cloud storage services for example would create problems for businesses.
The terrorist threat has not gone away, he went on; he listed also ‘culture wars’ and the worrying growth of extreme right-wing activism. Climate change is happening, and we will wait and see what happens with Brexit, in January – that is, when the transitional period to the UK leaving the European Union ends – when supply chains may be disrupted, if the transition goes badly. All those things could ‘pile on each other’.
While during the seminar he was careful to avoid speaking directly of the UK Government’s performance – its own resilience, that is, during the pandemic – he did say that those managing the current crisis ‘are unbelievably busy and unbelievably pre-occupied just trying to keep their arms round the existing crisis’. hence, as he argued during his presentation proper on ‘rules of resilience’ – for good and bad – the reason for thinking and preparing in advance, and thinking about generic capabilities, rather than specific plans (‘because whatever happens, it won’t be exactly what is in the plan’). He added: “It’s all very well having a fantastic business continuity plan, but if your supplier goes down, you are in the same position as they are.”
More in the November 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine.
About the speaker
Paul Martin, whose career in UK governmental security included heading CPNI, and four years as head of security for UK Parliament – which took in physical, personnel and cyber security – is the author of The Rules of Security: Staying Safe in a Risky World, published last year by Oxford University Press (click here for Professional Security’s review).
He was among the speakers at the Institute’s 2019 conference. The Institute’s 2020 conference is virtual instead of physically in London as usual and will consist of a week of talks at 10am and 3pm from Monday, October 19. Confirmed speakers so far are Dominic Fortescue, Dr Brooke Rogers, Minter Dial and CPNI.
The Institute’s next webinar is on October 7; on TCSM (Technical Surveillance Countermeasures), by corporate partner and TCSM consultancy Esoteric.
