Genesis of a Book

I’ve never been one not to do something just because I’ve never done it before, but when Nathan Thompson, CEO of Spectra Logic, came to me and said, “We need to write a book,” I was taken aback.  After he described the book’s premise, I was hooked. 

Basically, he asked a theoretical question, “What would happen to society if a cyber-attack took out the majority, if not all, of a single data storage medium?”  The most likely target for the attack would be disk drives.  The realism of this scenario struck me hard because  malware embedded in hard disk device drivers could do just that.  His question and its terrifying answer got me thinking about the data disasters that have already occurred or have the potential to occur.

You see, Nathan had just come from a storage conference in New York where Raymond Blum of Google had warned of just such a scenario — and called for diversity in storage media to ensure that a single, focused attack could not wipe out or create catastrophic devastation of an entire organization’s (or even an entire country’s) data repository. 

If we think about how heavily dependent on data our world is today, it doesn’t take too much to conclude that life as we know it would stop in its tracks if vital information were destroyed. As Nathan mulled over this concept of genetic diversity in data storage, a myriad of parallels emerged between nature’s approach to protecting a species and an IT administrator’s approach to protecting data. Just as the perpetuation of an organism is dependent on passing along its genome, the survival of an organization is dependent on passing along its accumulated intelligence — what we might term its “organizational genome.” 

These organizations include national governments, small businesses, multi-national corporations, volunteer groups, local governments, schools, churches, social media, medical and scientific research facilities, museums and archives, etc.  Collectively they create “society’s genome.”

Given nature’s five billion year history of protecting genomes, it seems we might have something to learn from its successful approach. This premise was enough to entice me to be part of a year-long project on writing Society’s Genome.  Hopefully it’s enough to entice you to read it.