Recently we have seen several catastrophic events causing huge disruptions, losses, and panic. There is a growing likelihood that these natural disasters and physical and cyber warfare attacks will increase in frequency and lethality, increasingly impacting civilian infrastructure, due to global warming, increased civil unrest and global tensions as international competition increases.
Imagine if two or more occur at the same time? Certainly, cyberattacks can be planned, rehearsed, and launched during the middle of one or more natural events. Up until now we have dealt with each of these events by trying to build systems that are better at detecting, preventing, and protecting us against them. Sadly, we have learned that these events cannot be totally prevented or stopped and have taken their toll.
There is a rising chorus arguing that we must learn to, both individually and collectively, become more resilient in the face of these disastrous events. But how? The author believes we can learn to do better by becoming more resourceful, innovative, collaborative, and by taking a page from how we fight wars.
This book details how these measures can be adapted to keep our systems operational and to rapidly reconstitute lost infrastructure.
Industry Reviews
This book provides an excellent overview of the coming technology improvements in computing and communications with its inevitable interweaving of computing in every aspect of our lives. This interweaving breeds extreme dependency; individuals and society cannot function without connectivity. Resiliency to inevitable disasters, both natural and human (cyber), will be a matter of life and (potentially large-scale) death. This isn't hyperbole, but the natural consequence of extreme dependency. The book provides a plethora of example applications that will bridge and blend the virtual and physical worlds. It will be critical, therefore, for the 'super' internet to be designed and built to be resilient to any potential attack, even those that are not foreseen even by the best visionaries. Resiliency is in some respects more important than any other property we might demand of the coming internet. Resiliency must be a first-class principle in the design of every layer in the communications stack. The book provides a clear description of what resiliency means, and how it is not the same as security, fault tolerance, and business continuity. It is a topic that stands on its own and that future architects and system designers should study and think about deeply. This book is an excellent grounding in the topic, and will grow in importance, especially when failures in our current systems demonstrate just how hard it is to keep operating in the face of major outages--Salvatore Stolfo, Professor at Columbia University
