Digital espionage, data leaks, hacker attacks and, above all, the scandal surrounding the NSA espionage and surveillance. This is what will be remembered about the year 2013 in security.

In a world where it’s the norm to manage and store data in virtual spaces, to access them everywhere at any given time, reactions to reveals such as Edward Snowden’s should provoke clear reactions. The outrage was there, but it subsided quickly. The attention-span seems to be getting smaller and smaller, indicating that we just might be damaged by the information overload that we experience on a daily basis.

The year 2013 was, looking back at it, a very interesting year. A year full of change for us at scip AG. Apart from the surveillance and espionageaffair surrounding Edward Snowden, scip AG was kept alert by work surrounding cloud- and cloudlike services as well as risk assessment, among other things. This brought us many new documents and questions concerning the new regulations (both domestic and foreign). A highlight was the Vendor Assessment we could perform on-site for one of the leading IT-manufacturers. the subject Unified Communications & Collaboration Solutions was something that seemed omnipresent in 2013 and we were more than happy to support our customers with the challenges these solutions bring. A considerable part of our security review work focussed on the subject of mobile computing. Over the course of the past twelve months, we have tested and assessed around 200 applications for iDevices and Android systems. The establishment of social media in the business world hasn’t quieted down the subject of security audits. Apart from new areas and fancy buzzwords, basic security audits and security architecture reviews such as Firewall rule reviews, web application tests, security assessments, concept reviews, trojan-based attack-attempts, configuration reviews and communication analysis are still very popular. Rightfully so.

Apart from all the contracting work for our customers, our employees regularly conduct research into the field of IT-Security and its development. Since 2009, a small part of these findings are published under the label Labs on our website. Starting this year, we have taken this one step further. We are happy to report that all the necessary work and processes have been completed in time and thus: Our first book, with the ISBN 978-3-033-04327-5 is going to be on sale starting January 6th, 2014. It contains selected Labs articles that were originally published in 2013.

The world is steadily shrinking, becoming a village, according to a German idiom. The cost consciousness of big companies act as an accellerant for that. A job that can be done in Switzerland might be done in Poland, the Czech Republic, the USA or India tomorrow. We are proud to have grown to be an IT-Security Company with a respectable name from Switzerland in our globally networked world.

To stand still means to lose. We are developing our company at a steady pace and we stick to our roots: Quality wins in the end. Always. We are looking forward to the years to come with our customers, our employees and the challenges that will face us.

About the Author

Simon Zumstein has been working in IT since the 1990s as an engineer, project lead, security consultant and CIO. Integral risk management while taking managerial-economic factors and the presentability to decision makers are his area of expertise.