The Symposium, held during February 1-3, 2010 under the sponsorship of ICANN’s Security Group and DNS-OARC, provided an opportunity to exchange ideas among people from all parts of the DNS community about what it means for the DNS to be “healthy,” and how the community should go about measuring its health. Co-sponsoring the symposium were Kyoto University and Nara Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

According to the conference keynote speaker, Andrew Sullivan [of Shinkuro, Inc.], one of the big challenges in defining health is that health of a large ecosystem such as a forest often supports — even encourages — locally unhealthy conditions. In other words, health is not a universal term that applies equally to all parts of a system at once; it implies a value of health that is relative to the entire system. Drawing a similar kind of parallel between the DNS and human health, many of the speakers and participants grappled with notions of measurement, privacy preservation, pattern analysis and, notably, the ongoing challenge posed by searching for unknowns in large data sets.

The conference website contains all of the symposium background material, and will also contain the final report, due to be published in March 2010.

According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of Millenials are either unaware of their companies’ information technology policies or are simply not inclined to follow them. It also highlighted the acceleration of a trend among younger workers that shows a bias toward using technology to connect with colleagues, peers, family and friends, instead of relying on telephone calls or face-to-face contact.  In other words, young workers’ habits are underscoring the difference between the technology that organizations provide their workforce and how young workers actually want to use technology to communicate and collaborate.

“The message from Millennials is clear: To lure them into the workplace, prospective employers must provide state-of-the-art technologies,” says Gary Curtis, managing director of Accenture Technology Consulting. “And if their employers don’t support their preferred technologies, Millennials will acquire and use them anyway. In order to acquire and retain the best talent, organizations must understand the technologies that the new workforce expects — and then find a way to support their employees without compromising enterprise security.”

The Accenture survey is the latest in a long string of studies in workforce behavioral analysis that points to employees as the weak link in the security chain.  While social networking software has long been the bane of CISOs, the evidence seems clear that information security and human resource policies must take modern technology into account or risk becoming obsolete.