Priorities --- Thank you @Juan for this timely intervention. This aligns very well with the discussions we have been engaging in thus far as it relates to whether or not cybersecurity issues (and especially those surrounding risk assessment and vulnerabilities) should be mainstreamed into the wider digital policy landscape that currently pays a great deal of attention to digital access and inclusion issues on one side of the spectrum, digital entrepreneurship and digital economy issues in the middle, and digital transformation on the other end. But what you may have done is widened the discussion even further to include the huge challenge that many governments face in treating with digital issues on the whole, far less those related to cybersecurity. Governments, and especially in the current circumstances with reduced revenues and limited budgets are forced to balance and prioritize a range of critical issues relating to crumbling and badly maintained infrastructure, crime and deviance (which, of course, can be closely related to cybersecurity and cybercrime), access to resources, agriculture, food production and self-sufficiency, poverty, inequality and inequity and ... the list goes on. The question I am posing therefore (noting that we are treating the policy issues and the technical aspects of cybersecurity with relatively equal importance in this course) is how can or should we ensure that cybersecurity issues - especially those related to risk assessment and vulnerabilities - force their way onto the priority list for national policy agendas? Carefully noting that, based on past history, once this happens, the private sector - including, critically, the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector normally follows suit.

Source author: Tracy Hackshaw TracyH@diplomacy.edu