Drafting Compliance Episode 1

Another way to thwart cyberattacks is to increase the number of cybersecurity experts, McGladrey says. According to the 2017 cybercrime report from the Herjavec Group, cybersecurity firms estimate such crimes are going to cost about $6 trillion annually by 2021. Companies are experiencing shortages in qualified applicants for cybersecurity jobs. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates there are now about 350,000 unfilled positions, and that number is only going to increase. McGladrey says.

“The future of work is not what we were collectively promised in the days before the pandemic. Despite being nearly two years into the global pandemic, organizations are still in the process of redefining how their offices should be used now and in the future, which has lead to a surge in the adoption of smart, digital technologies.”

“The explosion of connected devices also requires re-thinking the protection mechanisms to apply to those endpoints,” says Kayne McGladrey, Director of Security and IT, Pensar Development. “Similarly, the widespread adoption of cloud-based services means that there’s no single network to protect.”

“We can anticipate that any nation-state with a propaganda department or agency is working to right-size their capabilities to spread disinformation.” It’s especially true, he adds, among nation-states with larger budgetary allocations since they can use automation and “office employees” to distribute the narratives.

Because of the noise-to-signal ratio, network security is particularly challenging for colleges and universities, says Kayne McGladrey, CISO and CIO of Pensar Development and member of the technology industry group IEEE.

“Every university has a whole crop of new individuals who come into the organization on an annual or quarterly basis,” McGladrey explains. With such a frequent influx of new arrivals bringing their own devices and computers, it’s essentially impossible for university IT teams to control the sheer number of new endpoints. AI can identify networking traffic, assess what “normal” looks like on a university network and do it at a larger scale that humans can accomplish. Thus, if a “faculty member normally arrives at 8 a.m., does work until 7 p.m. and then maybe logs on to her email at 9 p.m., you wouldn’t expect that individual to be up at 3 a.m. connecting from China. AI can monitor those patterns of normalcy,” he says.

“The CIO won’t see the business impact if there’s not a culture of risk mitigation,” says Kayne McGladrey, director of security and IT for Pensar Development and a member of the professional association IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

“A culture where security is seen as someone else’s problem will derail any conversation around security, so the biggest thing for CISOs is to make the conversation with CIOs around risk – not around technologies or shiny objects but around risks to the business.”