A mile­stone is a step­ping stone

Unbe­knownst to me at the time, a new chap­ter opened up in my life years ago. More than a chap­ter, really — a whole new vol­ume was started back then. For the more I learned, the more I cast off what I had pre­vi­ously learned. And look­ing back, some stepping-stones in my path were big mile­stones in disguise.

“You can’t con­nect the dots look­ing for­ward; you can only con­nect them look­ing back­wards. So you have to trust that the dots will some­how con­nect in your future. You have to trust in some­thing — your gut, des­tiny, life, karma, what­ever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the dif­fer­ence in my life.” ~Steve Jobs

When I started this blog seven years ago, I could not imag­ine how pro­foundly my par­tic­i­pa­tion in social media would affect me, by open­ing new doors and per­haps clos­ing some oth­ers. Every sin­gle one of my pro­fes­sional oppor­tu­ni­ties over the past four years has stemmed from my use of social media. In this respect, online par­tic­i­pa­tion has been as sig­nif­i­cant a part of my learn­ing as com­plet­ing an MBA pre­vi­ously had been. In many ways, social media has also rep­re­sented the unlearn­ing of parts the MBA — but that is the sub­ject for another post.

Yes­ter­day, a new and unex­pected door was opened when McGraw-Hill pub­lished a book I co-authored, my first: “Secur­ing the Clicks: Net­work Secu­rity in the Age of Social Media.” I say “unex­pected” because in the over­all scheme of things, know­ing myself, the thought of becom­ing a pub­lished author was most cer­tainly another one of my self-delusional flights of fancy. Or so I thought. Over the past year, I also learned that writ­ing a book is no easy stroll in the park — it’s an obses­sive, chimeric con­vo­luted process that will lay you to waste. How­ever, thanks to the rigor, per­sis­tence, and intel­lect of my co-authors, Gary Bahadur and Jason Inasi, the hard work was com­pleted and the dream became real­ity; I am for­ever grate­ful to them.

Why this book and why now?

As we know, social media plat­forms and tools now dom­i­nate people’s atten­tion and time spent online. It is no sur­prise that social media is also the pre­ferred vehi­cle for hack­ers inter­ested in com­pro­mis­ing cor­po­rate sys­tems. There have been numer­ous high-profile cor­po­rate attacks and hack­ers are becom­ing more sophisticated.

In this book, we describe a frame­work for ana­lyz­ing the cor­po­rate threat level from mul­ti­ple angles, to uncover risk areas and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. We define a matrix which out­lines a sys­tem­atic approach for devel­op­ing plans, poli­cies, and processes to reduce risks and to keep up secu­rity over the long-term.

The book includes notable case stud­ies, recent exam­ples, and best prac­tices from around the world, and cov­ers third-party soft­ware and ser­vices. Most impor­tantly, we empha­size a cross-functional col­lab­o­ra­tion across the orga­ni­za­tion, includ­ing IT, HR, and mar­ket­ing & PR.