Russia is a potent enemy...
... but, we should be able to protect ourselves better than this from a geopolitical rival with a) the GDP of Italy and b) from whom we don't buy hardware.
The USA (and probably many other western countries) are suffering because too many budget decisions are made by people who are only focussed on 'shareholder value'
Technical expertise is simply too expensive for these people. That is one of the driving forces for technologies for monitoring and managing (and, it turns out, penetrating) vast swathes of IT --- usually with a small set of tools and often a ridiculously small set of physically separate installations. Such technology should have freed up the IT bods to make them more effective at out-of-band tasks, including improving threat detection, but the managers always see it as a way to reduce the number of humans who are required for day-to-day operation, and have always regarded IT activities beyond Business As Usual with suspicion.
Having worked in insurance IT, I've often wondered if IT beancounters should be actuaries, not accountants - at least the former have some idea of how to price risk - the latter just seem to be focussed on the bottom line. Also, many of the actuaries I have met actually like technology :-D
Biting the hand that feeds IT
