The CISO collective by Fortinet
Ved Prakash Nirbhya, CIO, Tech Mahindra
The network serves as a center post holding everything together, including distributed data centers, multi- cloud environments, new edges, dispersed IoT solutions, and distributed business- critical applications. Hybrid networks span the entire digital business environment, from campuses to branch offices and from the cloud to workers at home. We spoke with Ved Prakash Nirbhya, CIO, Tech Mahindra on how he has gone about securing his distributed network.The threat landscape has changed significantly and continues to do so. How are you prepared to respond to threats?
Steady and significant income from ransomware both, incentivizes threat actors to launch more ransomware and gives them the financial resources to do so. It also enables them to invest in more sophisticated approaches in an effort to stay ahead of security measures that better prepared and cyber savvy organizations are putting in place. At the same time, attackers have become more sophisticated in the way they execute their business plans. For us at Tech Mahindra, the challenge to stay ahead of emerging threats is nothing new. We have a security strategy in place that we have arrived at after a lot of internal deliberation. We have created a team which is prepared to address all our security needs, we conduct regular security audits to monitor our infrastructure and to discover vulnerabilities in our network. Our endeavors are aimed at shrinking the attack surface by identifying possible threat vectors and segmenting them in defined categories. Additionally, we also have a response plan in place with a trained recovery team which is evaluated every week by rankings and score cards to keep them in sync with the changing needs of the work ecosystem.
In a hybrid work model like yours what security strategies should businesses rely on?In a hybrid work model, the attack surface is dependent on how the services provided by a business are exposed to other open and public networks, the applications used, user endpoints on the edges, and the types of access provided at the edges.
Today, in the hybrid work environment, for organizations, the ability to address all scenarios flexibly, but securely, is the name of the game. Guarding the cyber frontier is the need of the hour, hence, having a security solution in place, that can help organizations adapt to any type of hybrid work model, is imperative. We need to look for a solution that brings security and networking together. This convergence across the connected environment, from the core to the branch to data centers to the cloud enables organizations to effectively see and defend today’s highly dynamic work environments.