The chief information security officer is the head of all information security operations within a company. He or she is tasked with determining the overall direction of the infosec resources under his/her domain, how the resources will be apportioned within the various disciplines, managing all the people in his/her department, and interacting with all other departments in the organisation. 

Often the face of an organisation’s infosec operations, the CISO is expected to interact with outside actors, including regulators, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies.

As organisations become more digitally native, the CISO's role need to evolve from tactical to strategic, from being a pure technologist to one that of a business enabler first.

In this PodChats for FutureCISO, we are joined by Yvette Lejins, resident CISO, APJ, Proofpoint, for her take on evolving cyber threats and how cybersecurity is responding to these changes. 

1.       Proofpoint has just released its 2022 Voice of the CISO report. 

a.       What is the purpose of the report?

b.       The 2022 Voice of the CISO report is the second such report. What's different from the first report published in 2021?

c.        What would you say are the top 3 lessons/insights you can draw from it? (use as intro for the rest of the interview)

2.       Every major security vendor publishes security reports. A common theme of these reports are ever increasing cyberthreats. Specific to the current environment that we are – the uncertainties that hang over us as a result of the pandemic, does remote work make organisations more vulnerable to attacks? Why? 

3.       Since the start of the pandemic, we've noted an increase in the use of VPNs purportedly to mitigate against risks of attackers using remote workers to attack the enterprise. How has this worked so far?

4.       In addition to VPNs, can you name a few other measures organisations have implemented to protect against cyber threats?

5.       Beyond increasing employee security awareness and preparedness enough, what more can be done to improve cybersecurity posture?

6.       Give three tips for the CISO to become more effective as (a) business partner; (b) champion of security for the organisation?

“According to research, face-to-face communication is conveyed with 55% non-verbal, 38% vocal, and only 7% words in the words spoken.” – Albert Mehrabian, Prof. Psychology and a researcher of body language.
In the paper, Stress and Deception in Speech: Evaluating Layered Voice Analysis, the authors posit that human oral communication contains features, which can be used to provide useful information about a speaker apart from the linguistic content, or meaning, of what was said, and that this indexical information can prove exceedingly helpful in forensic work.

In today’s PodChats for FutureCIO, we are joined by James Ellender, CEO, Behavioural Cues to talk about use cases for layered voice analysis or analytics.

James, welcome back to PodChats for FutureCIO.

1.       Define layered voice analysis (LVA)? How does it work?

2.       In what areas of business is LVA being applied today?

3.       If an organisation intends to apply layered voice analysis, what technologies or processes need to be introduced? What expertise is needed to make LVA investment effective?

4.       What are the integration challenges that come with LVA? 

5.       Any potential issues on privacy?

6.       How does an organisation determine if LVA is what they really need?

 Three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial shock of discovering that supply chains are vulnerable, we continue to experience vulnerabilities across the supply chain. 

Sachin Thukral, Head of Partner & Alliances, at HERE Technologies Asia Pacific talks about the increased importance of partnerships in the quest to mitigate the risks of supply chain vulnerabilities that have become more pronounced at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Q1 2020. 

1.       How is this vulnerability impacting various parties in the supply chain ecosystem? 

2.       What have we learned from the disruptions? 

3.       Looking at the supply chain ecosystem, can you elaborate on the importance of collaboration among the firms to achieve greater resilience against disruptions? 

4.       How is location intelligence helping businesses within this transport & logistics ecosystem to tackle and overcome these challenges? 

5.       We often hear these days around sustainability and ESG. What the entire transport and logistics (T&L) ecosystem is doing to achieve sustainability targets? 

6.       From a location provider point of view, what are some emerging trends within this supply chain ecosystem? 

Oxford Languages define identity as the fact of being a person or thing. According to the World Bank ID4D data, over a billion people around the world do not have an official proof of identity. In Asia-Pacific up to 20% of the population lacks an ID. 

Even as governments race to implement national digital identities, private sector service providers like banks or insurance are not always able to make use of these ID system features, even where the public entities can do so. In less develop sectors of economies, the challenge is even more significant reflecting broader gaps in digital infrastructure, capacity, access and literacy. 

Juniper Research estimates that by 2024, governments around the world will have issued 5 billion digital identity credentials. The question becomes will private sectors embrace these by then. The follow-up question to this – how do we securely access, use and manage these identities.

In today’s PodChats for FutureCIO, we are joined by Quah Zheng Wei, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Accredify, to talk about digital identities and what he calls verifiable identity.

1.                   Let’s start with a base and move from there. Define for us identity in the context of today’s digital economy? How many identities can one person have that can be used to authenticate him or her?

2.                   What is verifiable identity? What is/are the problems it aims to solve? Is this the only approach to solving the same problem?

3.                   Who owns the identity in this verifiable identities? Where does it sit in an organisation’s identity security strategy?

4.                   What are the benefits of this solution at IT/tech level, user level, from perspective of security, and from compliance perspective?

5.                   Will this use of verifiable identity introduce latency, friction to the user experience?

6.                   Given that there are many approaches to verifying an identity, how does an enterprise decide which verifiable identity solution providers when looking to introduce verifiable identity as part of its security strategy.

Decades ago, while working for a Japanese company, I read about the idea of lifetime employment. At the time I was aware of career professionals in tech companies. For instance, I would meet with career IBMers – professionals who have worked for only one company, IBM, for majority of their career. 

In the case of Japan, lifetime employment was the practice of hiring workers directly out of school and retraining them until the mandatory retirement age. The idea was that it is far easier to train current employees on new skills, new ways of working, etc.  

These days, of course, one’s career prospects are influenced by many factors most important by the value one contributes to his job, his team, and the company as a whole. Lifetime employment is a rarity if it exists today.

The world of work has changed significantly. Prior to 2020, concepts like mobility, job satisfaction, ability to work in a team, thinking-out-the-box were priced attributes by employers and employees. Deloitte also acknowledged that even before the COVID-19, changes in the workplace were occurring, influenced in part by automation, algorithms driving decision-making, digital methods, agile and new ways of working.

In this PodChats for FutureCIO, Indranil Roy, executive director at Deloitte Southeast Asia Human Capital Consulting, describes the many pathways organisations can take to achieve resilience, relevance and innovation in 2022 and beyond.

QUESTIONS

1.       Deloitte suggests that employees bring their own motivation to the workplace, even suggesting having a sense of autonomy or control over the choices we make. What then is the role of the manager in support of their staff’s sense of autonomy?

2.       Can these 10 rules of modern work apply to situations such as a pandemic where uncertainty is the norm?

3.       Teams have always been a central fixture of the workplace. How different, and important, is networking in the modern workplace (Rule #6)?

4.       How does one publish ideas where the organisational culture neither encourages or promotes such practices. Do you suggest using public social platforms? Would this approach risk a person’s career?

5.       So many rules. Where do I start? Do I go with the easiest? Do I do all of them?

6.       Do I allow myself to be stumped by a rule and not move forward?

In a Forrester study commissioned by CINNOX, only 16% of all surveyed customers recently experienced interactions that exceeded their expectations. It indicates that although organisations are committed to becoming more customer-focused, they have insufficient understanding of customers’ expectations and are failing to deliver quality experiences. 

In more developed markets like Hong Kong and Singapore, customer experience sentiments were the lowest, with only 7% and 9% experiencing interactions that exceeded their expectations, respectively.

Patsy Wong, Chief Strategy Officer at CINNOX, says customer experience is the battleground that organisations compete on. 

In this PodChats for FutureCIO, we are joined by David Coghill, Head of Solutions Engineering, Asia Pacific & Japan, Twilio, to talk about the impact of automation on customer service and experience.

1. Give us a state of customer service today – what is working and what isn’t?

2. Some automation already exists in today’s customer service. Where are the major failings of these automation tools/processes?

3. Given that technology is an enabler for customer service (do you agree with this statement?), who decides what technologies should be integrated into the process?

4. What metrics should be used to evaluate the effectiveness of such an effort?

5. Can you cite any use case today where automation has proven to be an effective approach to enhancing customer service?

6. What is your advice to leaders looking for a more effective and efficient customer service operation?

7. What sort-of investments am I looking at when evaluating how to transform my processes to be more customer centric?

Andrew Lerner, VP analyst for Gartner noted the ton of hype lately over “NaaS” (Network as a Service). Enterprises generally like the notion of a flexible, consumption-based networking model regardless of user or application location (very cloud-like). 

He cautioned that not everything labelled NaaS is the real thing. “We’ve seen things marketed as NaaS that range from (basically) hardware leasing all the way to a true aaS offering,” he added.

To discuss in greater detail how it applies to businesses in Asia is Jon Green, Chief Security Officer for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

1.       What is Network-as-a-service (NaaS)? What is it not?

a.       What are the characteristics of a NaaS – viewed from a (i) CIO and a (ii) business user’s perspective?

2.       How does NaaS work? What infrastructure must exist on the customer side for NaaS to become feasible?

3.       What are the top three (a) business drivers and (b) IT driver for the adoption/use of NaaS?

4.       Why would a CIO consider adopting NaaS over the conventional in-house approach?

a.       How should a CISO get involved in the evaluation/implementation of a NaaS?

5.       What IT strategy is an alternative to NaaS? 

a.       When should this alternative be considered over NaaS and vice-versa? 

6.       Given that NaaS is a relatively new approach, would it make sense to (a) do a pilot first; (b) try a limited or small-scale NaaS implementation, or (c) go all in at the get-go?

7.       What should be the metrics/outcomes that will weigh heavily on whether a NaaS strategy is a success or not for a company?

8.       What questions to ask internally (to the CIO)?

9.       Is it possible to discover somewhere along the line that NaaS is not for us?

According to Forrester, 44% of purchase influencers in Asia Pacific consider improving customer experience (CX) as one of their top priorities over the next 12 months. 

Even a minor improvement to a brand’s customer experience quality can add revenue by reducing customer churn and lowering the cost of customer acquisition.

In my opinion, one of the 2022 Forrester predictions that stands out is the one predicting that the Future Of Customer Service Is “Automatedly” Human. 

According to Forrester, automation done well can guide and empower customers to reap the benefits of great customer service. 

In this PodChats for FutureCIO, we are joined by Vasupradha Srinivasan, senior analyst at Forrester, to get her perspective on this concept of automatedly human.

1.       Give us a state of customer service today – what is working and what isn’t?

2.       Some automation already exists in today’s customer service. Where are the major failings of these automation tools/processes?

3.       What do you mean by customer service is automatedly human?

4.       In an ideal setting, to what extent should automation be embedded in customer service?

5.       Given that technology is an enabler (unifier) for customer service (do you agree with this statement?), who decides what technologies should be integrated into the process? 

a.       What metrics should be used to evaluate the effectiveness of such an effort?

6.       Can you cite of any use case today where a decidedly automated human is proving effective?

7.       What is your advice to leaders looking for a more effective and efficient customer service operation?

At a recent FutureCISO Breakfast briefing, this one on the topic of “Looming cyberthreats in 2022 – Tipping the scale in your favour”, one of the areas covered was the different types of attacks used to get the target to click on a link. 

During the panel discussion, it was acknowledged that cybercriminals are employing as many tactics as they can to get the intended target to fall prey to the attack. Given that targets are becoming more aware of what fake content, in the form of social postings, email messages and websites looks like, criminal elements are decidedly combining previous attack approaches in the hope of landing that next victim.

One such attack is referred to as Telephone-oriented attack deliveries or TOADS. To talk to us about this form of threat is Adrian Covich, Senior Director of Systems Engineering, Asia Pacific and Japan at Proofpoint.

1.                   What is a telephone-oriented attack delivery, or TOAD?

2.                   How dangerous can TOADs be? Could you give some examples of how TOADs can impact consumers and businesses?

3.                   Though call centre threats are not new, they are evolving to become part of a robust and complex attack chain. Could you elaborate more on this?

4.                   How do you protect against these TOADS – viewed from the perspective of the enterprise and the consumer?

5.                   What are the top challenges that companies like Proofpoint face when it comes to battling TOADs and other phishing attacks?

6.                   What are some strategies that can be put into place?

Environmental, social, and corporate governance is an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits on behalf of the corporation's shareholders.

In recent years, climate change has elevated the visibility of ESG initiatives. While the Board has traditionally had oversight over ESG, increasingly we are seeing the CFO take on the role of manager reporting to the Board. 

But what about the CIO? IT systems which support many business processes themselves consume energy and generate waste, thereby contributing to carbon emissions. What can the CIO do to drive the organisation’s ESG initiative?

With us to talk about this is Jay Tuseth, vice president, Oracle Applications, ASEAN.

1)                  What are the three major factors or megatrends driving the increased focus on sustainability across key markets in Asia Pacific?

2)                  What do you think will be the key driver behind enterprise sustainability efforts in the near to medium term?

a.       Do you anticipate the pandemic to have a significant impact on these efforts?

3)                  What are the top three technologies in use today that can enhance the effectiveness or success of ESG initiatives?

4)                  With sustainability and digital transformation at the top of the business agenda in 2022, what can organisations across Asia Pacific do to maximise the potential of data at their disposal?

5)                  How should the CIO work with the sustainability officer or in some cases the CFO around the use and protection of data in pursuit of sustainability and social goals?

6)                  What is your advice to CIOs as to how they can support an organisation’s sustainability and social goals?