Contributor

E-stonia to lead the way in cyber defense for NATO

Opinion
Apr 2, 20081 min

Tallinn downtown
E-stonia, that burgeoning technology center and booming economic wunderkind, is sharing its cyber defense expertise with the other 25 nations of NATO.  A new Cyber Defense Center of Excellence is being set up in Tallinn by seven NATO nations including the US. Each will provide staff members who will concentrate on developing defense methods.

Frequent readers will be surprised to see me upbeat about anything led by a government initiative but I feel the same way about Estonia that many people feel about the Israeli Defense Forces: being on the front lines of battle has an amazing way of cutting through bureaucracy and BS.  This is one group to pay attention to. I hope they become the focus for worldwide cyber defense and even host conferences in the future to share what they develop.

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

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