Technology is becoming central in everything we do, and the motorsport industry is not an exception. The competitive aspect of the sport pushes technology and data analytics to the forefront of critical capabilities, intensifies the underlying complexities and dependencies of technology, and dramatically increases the range of threats motorsport organisations can be exposed to.
This is a good time to focus on Cyber Security, as the volume and impact of Cyber incidents explode. As a result, the Cyber security Industry is maturing. As a barometer on the maturity statement, today, there are 4,000 technology vendors in the Cyber Industry, this volume and distribution of providers is a normal characteristic of early-market in the technology industry. Today in the Cyber Security industry, this proliferation is quickly consolidating into workable and integrated services.
Applying the right cyber security solutions in a vendor-neutral approach will allow the motorsport organisations to leverage the maximum potential of sensors, cloud technologies, analytics and highly distributed team synergies. Accelerating transformation and performance with the minimum of risk will come from confident execution across an increasingly collaborative community, further transforming motorsport.
Three priorities in the Motorsport industry enabled through a mature approach to Cyber Security are as follows: -
Distributed, Always Connected Teams and Technology Services
The challenge: The motorsport industry has extremely diverse ecosystem of partners, suppliers, engineering and development teams. The need for tighter collaboration and dynamic information sharing is essential for agile workforce. The IT environment, cloud-enabled networks and applications are distributed over multiple locations, domains, and platforms introducing complexities of inefficient operational security management and inconsistent policy enforcement. This puts pressure on access control, identity management and control governance to deliver timely, efficient, frictionless experience for the workforce and avoid incidents that would result in unwanted effects and poor team performance.
Benefits:
- Speeds up the secure on-boarding / off-boarding of partners (users) and their corporate issued or personal devices
- Improved security governance and regulatory compliance through consistent, repeatable context-aware security controls and policy enforcement across ecosystem of partners and technology products and services
- Real-time responsiveness to security incidents and anomalies to enable expedient decision making and response
- Cost reduction of managing disparate systems and applications over multiple geographies and organisational boundaries
- Increased productivity and application access convenience through frictionless context-driven identity management and authentication methods across multiple screens, platforms and devices
Insights and Informed Decisions
The challenge: Over a 400GB of data is usually transferred during a race weekend between on-event teams and the HQ (factory site) (source RedBull). Whilst most of motorsport organisations have no issues of collecting data on the car and engineering/design performance data, the increasingly complex challenge is to link this data with other historical and test datasets (e.g. tyres, weather conditions, engine) and turn into insights and value creation. The speed of access to information and its integrity is in direct relation to competitiveness and operational performance. Efficient and secure information management across diverse engineering, operations and design teams is essential for accurate analysis of big data and real-time access for all cloud and on-premise systems and applications.
Benefits:
- Innovate faster based on reliable, integrity protected datasets wherever they sourced from
- Drive up team performance and competitive advantage
- Assurance that you work with the most accurate and complete information
- Faster development and optimised vehicle performance
- Real-time secure data integration, irrespective of the product, platform or vendor
Intellectual Property Protection
The challenge: The motorsport organisations take advantage of technologies that are outside of traditional enterprise control in dynamic, very often ephemeral, environments, and where traditional security technologies have limited applicability or success. Cloud, mobile, social and big data each on its own a disruptive force changes everything in relation to protecting the intellectual property (aka “crown-jewels”) one motorsport business would have. There’s an increasingly prominent threat from frequent changes in staff (often leaving to competitors) and data pervasiveness making difficult to track and enforce consistent sensitive information protection policies that would give us a basic understanding of who’s accessing data, from where, what device and in what context is being used.
Benefits:
- Ability to focus on data flows and seamless protection of IP (and sensitive data in general) from accidental or malicious activities
- Extend the policy enforcement and security compliance assurance across multiple organisational boundaries and realms of trust
- Non- intrusive solution to facilitate convenience whilst adhering to internal and external security and regulatory compliance norms
- Seamless, at the appropriate level, access to sensitive data for all employees and third parties
- Make cost of security predictable and shift information protection focus on what matters to the organisation to stay competitive
