Comment by vlovich123

I agree that safety & security are frequently conflated, but I don't think the important aspect is that there's no analogy between IT & construction.

IT safety = construction safety. What kind of cracks/bumps does your bridge/building have, can it handle increase in car volume over time, lots of new appliances put extra load on the foundation etc. IT safety is very similar in that way.

IT security = physical infrastructure security. Is your construction safe from active malicious attacks/vandalism? Generally we give up on vandalism from a physical security perspective in cities - spray paint tagging is pretty much everywhere. Similarly, crime is generally a problem that's not solvable & we try to manage. There's also large scale terrorist attacks that can & do happen from time to time.

There are of course many nuanced differences because no analogy is perfect, but I think the main tangible difference is that one is in the physical space while the other is in the virtual space. Virtual space doesn't operate the same way because the limits are different. Attackers can easily maintain anonymity, attackers can replicate an attack easily without additional effort/cost on their part, attackers can purchase "blueprints" for an attack that are basically the same thing as the attack itself, attacks can be carried out at a distance, & there are many strong financial motives for carrying out the attack. The financial motive is particularly important because it funds the every growing arms raise between offence & defense. In the physical space this kind of race is only visible in nation states whereas in the virtual space both nation states & private actors participate in this race.

Similarly, that's why IT development is a bit different from construction. Changing a blueprint in virtual space is nearly identical from changing the actual "building" itself & the cost is several orders of magnitude lower than it would be in physical space. Larger software projects are cheaper because we can build reusable components that have tests that ensure certain behaviors of the code & then we rerun them in various environments to make sure our assumptions still hold. We can also more easily simulate behavior in the real world before we actually ship to production. In the physical space you have to do that testing upfront to qualify a part. Then if you need a new part, you're sharing less of the design whereas in virtual space you can share largely the same design (or even the exact same design) across very different environments. & there's no simulation - you build & patch, but you generally don't change your foundation once you've built half the building.