When your reputation is tarnished, your finances are impacted, your identity is stolen, your physical well-being is threatened, your company’s reputation and finances are harmed, and, quite possibly, your country is overthrown, then you’ll wake up to the need for cyber security. But it might be too late then. Like people living in a flood zone, the question isn’t whether the flood is coming, but rather when the disaster will hit and whether you’ll be prepared for it. The time to buy digital-security flood insurance is now! Don’t wait until the flood hits.

A Practical Guide to TPM 2.0 can be part of your digital-security insurance policy. The TPM was designed as one of the core building blocks for digital security solutions. The November 2013 “Report to the President: Immediate Opportunities for Strengthening the Nation’s Cybersecurity” recommends “the universal adoption of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), an industry-standard microchip designed to provide basic securityrelated functions, primarily involving encryption keys, including for phones and tablets.” Computers and devices that incorporate a TPM are able to create cryptographic keys and encrypt them so they can be decrypted only by the TPM. A TPM provides this limited but fundamental set of capabilities that higher layers of cybersecurity can then leverage.

Today, TPMs are present in many laptop and desktop personal computers. They’re used by enterprises for tasks like secure disk encryption, but they have yet to be incorporated to any significant extent in smartphones, game consoles, televisions, in-car computer systems, and other computerized devices and industrial control systems. This needs to happen for such devices to be trustworthy constituents of the increasingly interconnected device ecosystem.