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NORTH AMERICAN Newsline JUNE 03, 2022 | The Indian Eye 20

ASEI’s engaging Cyber Security Summit

brings 20 thought leaders together

OUR BUREAU
Fremont, CA
hen it comes to cyber threats, one can’t
always predict when one will occur. But
Wone can prepare! The American Society
of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) hosted a vir-
tual conference with 20 speakers on May 21st at the
Cybersecurity Summit. The topic of cybersecurity
with growing incidents of ransomware, malware, cy-
berwarfare and hacking raises a lot of eyebrows in
our lives at personal as well as organizational levels
and hence the underlying theme of the summit was
“Because everyone needs to be secure.”
The summit was co-chaired and kicked off by
ASEI National President Piyush Malik who is serv-
ing as Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at
Veridic solutions and Bhawna Singh, a Senior Vice
President of Engineering at Cybersecurity ven-
dor Okta and a recent ASEI Engineer of the Year
awardee. Leading voices representing the cyberse-
curity industry - from software vendors to risk man-
agement consultants to cyber industry innovators to
emerging technology startups to government and
company board representatives were present and
joined by a wide range of experts from all walks of
the cybersecurity and technology industry.
ASEI Co-Chairs started the discussion by set-
ting the context, sharing the what and why of cyber-
security and the threat landscape.
As part of the digital agenda and with increas- unique personal perspectives on the topic while building a career in this industry - from a student
ing adoption of cloud, DevOps and Agile becoming sharing how their respective companies is helping. to developer to security engineer to a cyber product
mainstream as a result of embracing microservices eg IBM has introduced Cybersecurity as part of the manager and ultimately a cybersecurity leader.
and containerization, over 55% of organizations award winning public-private P-Tech program for Jyothsna Lekkala from Zoom then talked
release software products weekly. This naturally high schoolers and iZen has come up with an in- about Software Supply Chain Security and how it
causes strain if security principles are not adopted telligent edtech solution accelerating cybersecurity has evolved from physical to software more so since
upfront by developers. knowledge for universities and organizations alike the 9/11 attacks. Was shocked to learn that within 3
In his keynote, titled “Enabling Engineers to with or without internet access years from now, over 50% organizations’ software
Build a Secure Future”, Ankur Shah from Palo Alto Aastha Verma, former President at ASEI supply chains are likely to be targeted.
Networks talked about Security supply chains being Washington DC chapter, spoke next about CISA The power packed Geopolitical panel moderat-
the new targets by malicious actors and gave tips to and its initiatives in ethical hacking to protect the ed by Cybersecurity for PM Author Niharika Srivas-
the engineers in the community to “move fast, build homeland. As Department of homeland security’s tav -addressed the role of cybersecurity in the cur-
great things and make sure everything is secure”. (DHS) CISA Branch Chief for Vulnerabilities, she rent geopolitical instability caused by threats from

One small vulnerability in infrastructure-as-code at was able to share a lot of resources to help the au- Russia-Ukraine war as well as increasing use of
the repository level can lead to 1000’s of problems dience understand how the government and public rouge-nation backed deliberate sabotage and highly
and hence the cost to remedy rises exponentially can work hand in hand to curb the cyber risks. To sophisticated cyberwar attacks.
downstream. Citing AWS CTO Werner Vogels, he cite a couple, she shared “Shields up” and “Presi- The panelists Rita Archrekar - Board director
stressed on security being a shared responsibility and dents Cup” initiatives which are all available to the at ICICI bank, Anshu Gupta - CISO at Silicon Val-
presented a solution of breaking silos by prescribing population via CISA website ley based SVCI and Vishal Chawla, a senior partner
a DevSecOps approach and leveraging automation. The Women in Cybersecurity Panel was led by at PWC brought in their rich and specialized point
Moderated by Invigrid CEO Yogita Parulekar Chitra Dharmarajan with panelists Rupa Mittapalli of view from their observations and experiences.

, the first panel discussion focussed on the daunt- from IBM, Upasna Saluja from AT&T and Anusha The theme of building resiliency into our systems
ing Talent gap in the growing cyber security space Vaidhyanathan from Zscalar. The amazing life /ca- came up repeatedly. Companies need an ability of
with panelists Chirag Shah from Model N, Nataraj. reer transformation stories of these women leaders their systems to detect, contain and eradicate these
Nagaratnam CTO IBM Security & Laxmish Bhat- and how they got into the industry and what keeps external as well as insider threats & cyberattacks.
President iZen. With 80% of recent security breach- them going in applying scientific method to cyber To get away from FUD and misinformation being
es attributed to skills gap with 38% losing over a risk management and protection from cyberthreats propagated by cyber vendors, a number of things
$1Million each, this panel assumed a pivotal role in inspired us all. A number of tips for pivoting into need to happen: viz Security hygiene is a must have
the summit. Each of the speakers brought forward cybersecurity were shared. We also learned about practice in organizations.

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