Humanitarian perspective of cybersecurity and cybersecurity governance

The state of national security is an evolving concern, as entities and organizations may be aware of the security of their information and their asset — the same can unfortunately not be said about the risks they may face. These risks are not only limited to the non-existence of security procedures. Existing security can be severely flawed, especially if there is non-conformance towards policies, practices and procedures. When looking at humanitarian actions, we can easily identify these flaws. Unfortunately, humanitarian aid has to compete with factors from within the states, countries and continents they are working in. As our research indicates, humanitarian agencies are some of the agencies that do not always take security into consideration. The purpose of this paper will be to introduce the importance of cybersecurity and cybersecurity governance with respect to humanitarian work. We will also introduce and briefly discuss a model that can be used by humanitarian agencies to assess, manage and maintain their cybersecurity and cybersecurity governance efforts.