I love this time of year, with March Madness excitement in the air and my Notre Dame Fighting Irish still in the tournament (as of the writing of this column)! More importantly – yes, more importantly – I love monitoring the 538 March Madness prediction website to see how the chances of winning change through the days, after games, and even within their 40 minutes of activity.
I like doing this because it is a better representation of how cybersecurity risk works than the way we typically think in our field. So, we can watch – even in real-time – how the chances of success (winning the game, moving on to the next round) and failure (losing) change with the variables during the game and the context outside of them (other games). As I watch those probabilities change – sometimes swinging wildly — I think of how cybersecurity-related risk changes in a similar manner, with the real-time activity in our computing environments – sessions, messages, transactions, flows, etc. — being established or sent.