“We adopt a proactive and holistic approach to security, both within BT and for customers”

In the ever changing security threat landscape, BT helps global multinational organisations with their security, cloud and networking services.  As the cyber threat landscape is growing with various emerging threats which create a requirement for hardware and software skills which in turn is creating a scope for professionals. Kevin Brown, Managing Director, BT Security has shared his views with VARINDIA about the current security landscape of India, security trends, BT’s latest technologies and its experience encountering cybercrime and fraud.

As we moving into a connected world the cybersecurity space is also getting complex with unauthorized network access, phishing emails or malicious cyber-attacks etc. Moreover, India is presently going through a transformation with adoption of new technologies, so organizations need to adopt advanced protection to secure their business.

Kevin Brown, Managing Director, BT Security says, “Today’s connected world faces the challenges of progressively evolving cybersecurity issues in the form of unauthorized network access, phishing emails or malicious cyber-attacks. Securing cyberspace is everyone’s responsibility, including government, businesses and individuals. India’s cyber-security landscape is going through a fascinating stage as businesses rapidly adopting new technologies. As a result, they have to look intensely at advanced ways to protect their companies from cyber-attacks and threats, with a particular focus on cloud security, IoT security and data protection.

As the technology advances the cybercrimes also increases. The process of keeping up with new technologies, security trends and threat intelligence is a challenging task. BT is helping its customers to fight against the odds. It has been seen that automated tools have made it easier for criminals to launch attacks, making it more difficult one for security teams. Every 40 seconds a business falls victim to a ransomware attack. Cybercriminals are creating an average of around 1.4 million phishing websites every month with fake pages designed to mimic the company they are spoofing.

According to Kevin, at BT alone, they detect more than 100,000 malware samples every day — more than one a second. But 99% of malware is used for less than one minute. In addition to over 4,000 cyber-attacks daily, BT and its customers see three million suspect emails per month.

Discussing about the cybercrimes and frauds Kevin says, “We adopt a proactive and holistic approach to security, both within BT and for our customers. We design security into our development plans from the start, as we consider it to be an intrinsic part of everything we develop. In keeping with BT's global scale, client base, and active relationships with leading law enforcement and cybersecurity authorities (such as Interpol, Europol and the UK National Cyber Security Centre), we are often the first to correlate events and be aware of new attacks.”

Security trends

Working closely with the National Crime Agency, BT detects organized cybercrime by supporting investigations and to build new capabilities to jointly investigate criminal infrastructure. Kevin feels understanding security trends is essential for businesses looking to take advantage of opportunities as they arise and act more quickly to reduce any risks to the business. “In 2019, the focus will be on Machine Learning/AI-enabled solutions; privacy and personal data protection; companies will continue to adopt IoT-enabled solutions to attain automation and efficiency; and cloud adoption will also continue to grow, with companies having a renewed focus on cloud security as a result.” he points out.

Kevin thinks AI is always helpful in ensuring seamless operations and better security systems. He further explains, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have affected the security industry in a major way. AI is advancing rapidly and it has helped automate and digitize process and drive new technologies; businesses and a lot of companies are adopting it for organizational development as a result. At BT, we use these technologies to ensure seamless operations and better security systems for our customers. Our researchers have developed AI software that is already significantly helping our analysts to fight cybercrime. The technology has also been implemented into our virtual reality capabilities, allowing our security analysts to collaborate in a huge virtual workspace.”

Enabling the digital future

In the changing world, IT security has become the most important. Organizations move to the cloud because of the advantages in mobility, cost, flexibility, scalability and so on – but it has profound security implications. On this context Kevin depicts, “The adoption of disruptive new technologies such as cloud, SD-WAN, NFV, IoT and big data are fundamentally changing the way we do business. All these technologies bring great opportunity to achieve growth and increase efficiency. However, they also make our digital environments more complex to secure: for instance, more breakout points to the internet; more encrypted data travelling across networks; and company data and applications stored across third-party cloud environments. Hence, we cannot have a successful digital transformation without security transformation. Also, we cannot just focus on prevention – security strategies should be shaped by detection and recovery too.”

At BT, they enable a digital future with all the products having security at their foundation, helping customers to manage the risks and seize the potential of new technologies. BT has been at the forefront of cyber-security development, as it’s been an essential part of protecting the global network for many years. BT shares best practices and help develop cybersecurity efforts in various regions.

AT LAST

With a growing number of enterprises moving critical applications to the cloud and adopting new digital strategies across the rest of the business, it has never been as important to have a clear view and control of what is happening on the corporate network. “In India, we have a number of large organizations as our customers. Our customer-base cuts across a wide range of industries, including IT, banking & financial services, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. We help our corporate customers to improve their business reliability, become more globally competitive, and focus on their core customer business. We combine our global insight on the threat landscape with in-depth local knowledge and understanding of market needs so that businesses can grow securely. Additionally, we deploy our learning from one market to other regions and industries, giving us the ability to constantly develop our services.” concludes Kevin.