Critical Information Infrastructure Cyberspace Situational Awareness: Measure it, Manage it
Abstract/ Overview
Background: The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were designed to serve as a useful guide for focused and coherent action on sustainable development at the global, regional, national and local levels, and also help to mainstream sustainable development into the United Nations system by 2030. Information, a leading factor of production cutting across all sectors lacks the due consideration as a significant enabler of progressive development of infrastructure and e-readiness for improved service delivery. Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) players have set up a local, regional and global collaboration arena which inevitably involves among others intensive information sharing, collaboration, distribution and preservation in the cyberspace, powered by assorted information communication technologies (ICTs). The cyberspace, however, has been targeted by cybercriminals with the view to compromising the confidentiality, integrity and availability of strategic information systems in the CII. Materials and Methods: With Kenya as a case study, using purposive sampling and qualitative analysis using Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2), this study explores the level of cyberspace situational awareness with a view to leveraging on its maturity level. Results: It is established that cyberspace situation awareness is an obligatory requisite towards cyberspace security management approaches which is predominantly technical solutions oriented. The study further reveals that a thorough and comprehensive cyberspace incidents’ intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance are vital, but missing components to achieving a mature, measured and managed cyberspace which may guarantee the assurance of CII platforms. Conclusion: In view of these findings, we demonstrate and create insights into how other non-technical thematic areas are pertinent towards the cyberspace situational awareness. It is recommended that adopting suitable framework encompassing technical, social and political facets would enable a maturity, sustainability and furtherance of CII cyberspace situational awareness, being core ingredient of information governance, thus the achievement of the e-readiness for improved delivery of SDGs.