By J.D. Hildebrand03/06/2012 03:34 PM EST
Article from Software Development Times
Do you want to sit in that cubicle forever? Or do you cherish a secret dream of striking off on your own? Wouldn’t you like to start a small business and see if you have what it takes to make it grow? “Every normal man,” said H.L. Mencken, “must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
The problem with going rogue is that entrepreneurship is risky. We settle for lives as employees because we have too much at stake to roll the dice on a questionable business venture. Prudence is an understandable and appropriate response to decisions of magnitude. But we promise ourselves that if ever the right opportunity presents itself, we’ll make the leap.
I’m here to tell you that the opportunity is here. You want to start a business with an excellent chance of success and rapid growth in the U.S. and Western Europe? I’ve got the idea for you.
If you’ve been reading my posts here regularly, it’s possible you’ve already connected the dots:
- An operating system for cities
- Cyberwar’s first shots have been fired
- Smart infrastructure plus malware equals disaster
- Distributed intelligence means distributed security risks
- Insecure
- Security concerns top year-end news
Here’s the deal. Over the past decade, cities, counties, and states across America have augmented their electronically controlled water, gas, traffic-control, public-transport, and electrical systems with offsite command-and-control systems, wiring them up via Internet connections. Putting utilities online has improved efficiency and reduced costs, but it has exposed critical elements of the public infrastructure to malicious hackers.
Municipal systems have not been targets of cyber-attacks in the past, and they lack all but the most remedial security measures. If password protection is enabled, the systems are generally protected with the manufacturer’s default passwords. That’s how naïve local governments are about protecting their assets.
You want to be an entrepreneur? Here’s how you do it. Travel from city to city, analyzing vulnerabilities and installing protection. You don’t have to invent technology here. Tried-and-true secure lines, encryption, password protection, and firewalls will do much to make critical systems more secure. Help local governments organize and adopt attack-response measures.
Almost all utility systems are vulnerable, but cities have been slow to act. The need is urgent and the market is on the verge of exploding. Now is the right time to jump into this field.
You may find yourself more marketable if you acquire credentials. The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) offers classes on infrastructure protection through the National Cyber Security Division’s Control Systems Security Program. US-CERT’s Cross-Sector Roadmap for Cybersecurity of Control Systems (PDF) contains some excellent background data that you will want to include in your business plan and your sales presentations.
If you’re serious about stepping out on your own one day, I think now’s the time to do it. This is an opportunity to achieve independence, make a bundle of money, and help the good guys defend themselves against attack. Why wait?
Web recommendation: In my most recent post I cited Edge, which describes itself as a collection of the world’s “most complex and sophisticated minds.” I’ve spent some more time with the site since then, and I must say I am not impressed. The articles suffer from grammatical errors, misused and inconsistent punctuation, dead links, and misspelled words. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great stuff there. (And I dare say you’ll find the odd typo among my own online postings here and elsewhere.) It’s just, for a site that goes out of it way to proclaim itself the homepage of the world’s top intellectuals, edge.org has an embarrassing number of errors. The folks at Edge may be brilliant, but even geniuses need editors. J.D. says check it out.
J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He’s dead serious about the entrepreneurial opportunity he outlines in this post.
Article from Software Development Times