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By Srinivas Kumar

A decade ago, cybersecurity professionals engineered a sandbox to trap viruses for introspection. Today, the coronavirus has sandboxed engineers with stay-in-shelter awaiting health checks. The status quo has reversed.

Over two decades ago, the telecommunications industry coined the term “family of equipment failure” referring to a cascade effect wherein the failure of one piece of equipment in a hierarchy could trigger another equipment in a family of interdependent equipment to fail. The coronavirus pandemic triggered a family of institutions and businesses – the supply chain – to fail. The interdependence in device operations and human activities of daily living has been exemplified.

By Srinivas Kumar

The challenges, blockers to change, and the decisions required to embark on change vary across industry sectors. The policies and processes that have been engrained over decades of information technology (IT) dominance and stewardship may become the inhibitors of change without a strategy for change. The intrinsic nature of risks has changed and therefore the solutions must too.

By Srinivas Kumar

The proliferation of autonomous digital devices in our daily lives, what we refer to as the Internet of Things, is poised to connect with other things in a chain of clouds to serve a much larger purpose and make possible a much wider spectrum of services. You can think of this as the socialization of things, where things communicate with other things – near and far. The power of locally connected things is a game changer for local economies, in both urban and rural communities. From the energy grid, to water supply systems, roads, trains, farms, schools, factories, hospitals, healthcare workers, and first responders the connectivity of things is becoming an enabler for economic prosperity.

By Srinivas Kumar

Device transformation and protection is required to revolutionize digital transformation, just as virtualization and software defined networking were required to revolutionize data centers. Operations Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) are fundamentally dissimilar. To begin with, the problem space is radically different – unprotected devices versus gullible users as the carbon. This demands a different solution strategy. Cyber criminals exploit user psychology and over the past decade have truly transformed hacking from a cottage industry to a fine art. A device has no emotions. Devices can be made smarter than humans in cyberspace. Bridging the IT-OT divide (in some cases, a thin line) is the implementation challenge.

By Srinivas Kumar

Over a decade ago, we were told the cloud was not just a “secure” cloud, it was a “trusted” cloud. Today, cybersecurity companies are still playing detectives and cloud platform vendors and service providers are acquiring them for billions of dollars. In the end, can we trust chief risk officers to do the right thing and invest in protection after they have exhausted all detection alternatives? While detection is a valuable and necessary forensic analysis tool, not including protection as a strategy in the digital tool chest is a fatal oversight. Protection is what you do before detection becomes a necessity.