Digital Mental Health – Thinking about Cyber Health & Safety
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If you haven’t noticed, we are all working longer hours, and in those hours, spending more time online. We check emails from the minute we wake to the time we go to bed, so how are we maintaining good practices to reduce risk of burnout, stress and falling victim to phishing attacks? In a world that is increasingly remote, how do we maintain good communications with our teams and business? How do we ensure a distracted workforce does not become a point of attack?! Our webinar this month will explore the risks associated with remote/hybrid working and why a stressed, fatigued workforce is the biggest risk we face today. We’ll explore strategies and ideas to combat these risks and create happier, healthier and more secure organisatons.
Our speaker Geoff is a digital entrepreneur focussed in online engagement, currently leading Safe Space one Ltd, and also a director for the South West Cyber Security Cluster. His particular area of focus is how to engender trust in digital engagement in the face of a web that seeks to undermine all aspects of confidentiality in communication - he was in silicon valley when Facebook and Google were born and did not support their exploitative business practices. He has a BSc(Hons) in computer science with his dissertation on designing an AI natural language system to interrogate a database (late 80s). However since that time he has worked in what was called embedded or real-time systems, now more commonly called the IoT or sometimes just OT. He worked as an engineer at Marconi’s writing part of the Internet (the first digital connection to the Internet) and subsequently brought to the UK market the 1st commercial real-time operating systems, TCP/IP embeddable networking stacks, and then the 1st secure operating systems and then safety-critical operating systems (mostly aircraft and vehicles). He then led the EU operations of various US companies bringing state of the art development tools to leading systems developers, slowly moving up the software stack into 3d systems (simulators) and rapid prototyping for Human Computer Interaction. His company was acquired along with 4 others and he went to Silicon Valley to lead the strategy for merging these companies products into a single market solution, leading 10 product managers and 300 software engineers. He then worked for 10 years in distributed data systems and data architectures, with a focus on data-centred system interoperability (using semantic data methods). His first startup company won a competition to make crowded places safer after the Manchester bomb, but was forced under by lockdown - there were no crowds! So since 2020 he has focussed on mental health care (for personally motivated reasons, you can read about here https://blog.safespaceone.com) and recently won an innovation award from Innovate UK to build a patient-centred managed self-care platform focussed on mental health care, but with application across clinical research and any long term care needs.
The YCSC is a professional network of cyber security practitioners and those with an interest in the industry, created as part of the UK Cyber Security Forum to help cyber security experts and organisations across the region to collaborate and build a stronger standard of cyber security as part of a knowledge exchange collective.
The cluster's role is to support, inspire, and work collaboratively with cyber security professionals to strengthen the regional cyber security ecosystem.
1. Achieve sustainable funding
2 . Develop a strong committed community membership
3 . Support local economy
4. Establish as an authentic leader in the cyber security industry
5. Defining, developing and support achievable pathways
