How Technology From Classic TV, Movies Can Teach Lessons to Today’s IT

By Darryl K. Taft

Self-driving cars are predicted to be coming soon to a dealership near you, with such companies as Google toiling away at autonomous, smart vehicles. But the most well-known self-driving car is a jet black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am from 1982—Michael Knight’s talking, artificially intelligent sidekick KITT. It’s one of the first pop culture TV examples of a future where tech would know no boundaries, and today the vision has largely come true. Like KITT, our tech-filled cars talk to us, give us directions and reminders, and, frequently, keep our kids entertained in the back seat. These are just a few examples to underscore that taking tech on the road has become the norm. This means that IT is supporting employees working in nearly any location, from the space station to oil rigs and any remote office.

Thousands of years in the future, one of R2D2’s most critical capabilities was the ability to display a hologram recording for Luke Skywalker and his companions. This feature fostered a sense of collaboration in the Star Wars series, and today’s enterprises are also investing in the tools and tech that offer this same capability. For IT pros, the ability to remotely tap into a machine, use screen sharing to show the user what’s being done and even invite in another tech into the same support session if need be (think of him as C3PO) are helping IT collaborate and fix systems faster.

The indelible image of the goofy, haphazard inventor Inspector Gadget might bring back fond memories of Saturday morning cartoons (for the non-Millennial generations). But each week some of those new gadgets went awry, and it was back to the lab for the Inspector. The lesson for IT? In today’s app-driven enterprises, developing and rolling out apps without embedded app support would be a major fail that sends IT back to the drawing board—but no one will be laughing at the delays and budget overruns.

What’s the best way to hide in plain sight? Star Trek showed us how cloaking devices could mask people and even entire starships, simply by enveloping them as if they weren’t there. As some of the major data breaches have shown recently, hackers also like to hide in plain sight in the network. Whether it’s leveraging unsecure remote access points or entering with stolen third-party credentials, businesses are effectively giving hackers a cloaking device to mask their illicit activities. Once inside, hackers can remain invisible for months at a time, and without the right tools, finding traces of them can be extremely difficult.

Tech is only as good as the people behind it, and model IT employees aren’t always easy to find. Like the Fembots, appearances can be deceiving—so enterprises shouldn’t put blind faith in their IT staff. For many reasons, a seemingly trusted IT staffer could turn into an insider threat. Or, an inexperienced IT pro could unknowingly expose enterprise data. IT needs to protect against these threats by setting access permissions based upon experience and role, ensuring individual logins and passwords for every user, and immediately disabling access when an employee is no longer with the organization.

Most James Bond movie watchers can appreciate the cool factor of the tech gadgets invented by Q. Obviously, as a spy who deals in deceit and subterfuge, Bond’s ability to mask his identity was commonly and effectively used. Among the examples are a voice-changing device, fake fingerprints to gain access to secret evil lairs and a computerlike device that assembles a fake photo of any person. As any IT pro knows, security is a top concern, and while IT has to be vigilant and ready 100 percent of the time, a hacker only needs to be right once. They will constantly search for new tricks to manipulate their way into a business’s network. Often, that means pretending to be a legitimate vendor using fake or stolen credentials, or simply trying commonly used passwords to access a network.

Sometimes we all need a little extra muscle to take care of business. In Terminator 2, it was John Connor’s turn to reap the benefits of a technological helping hand. Leveraging technology can be an immense advantage, and if an organization can’t implement it effectively, the competition will. It’s always a race to see who can create and roll out the latest, greatest, biggest, baddest tech, and no one understands this better than IT. However, human intelligence is often the deciding factor in victory, as the defeat of the T-1000 proved.

Knowledge is power, and enterprises often must go to great lengths to protect it. Whether it’s credit card data or Cybertronian symbols, someone is always after the goods. In the realm of IT, it’s an ongoing battle between good and evil, and one that takes many shapes. Enterprise IT should treat every access point and system as essential to their survival, as there’s usually “more than meets the eye” in the scope and scale of network security threats.