Becoming Resilient

Dr. Dan Schutzer is a sought-after lecturer and author of numerous books and articles. His related work experience includes Founder and President of Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), one of the first virtual organizations, working on collaborative research for the financial services industry, primarily in fraud, security and payments; Head Advanced Technology for Citibank; Technical Director of US Naval Intelligence; first Technical Director of Navy Command, Control and Communications; Bell Laboratory working on ABM defense, in charge of discriminating between real warheads and decoys.

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