AMCHAM’s Eastern Region organized a panel discussion on ‘Security in a Digital Era’ at the Hyatt Regency over breakfast on Friday 21st July 2017 in Kolkata. The U.S. Consul General in Kolkata, Mr. Craig Hall, was the guest of honor. Mr. Gulshan Sachdev, Vice Chairman, AMCHAM and Managing Director, Quaker Chemical, gave the welcome remarks and Mr. Amit Malik, Vice Chairman – Eastern Region, AMCHAM and Director Public Sector and Services, Cisco Systems, moderated the session, which concluded in a very lively Q&A followed by the closing remarks. Ms. Amada Kidwai, Regional Director – AMCHAM welcomed guests, introduced the panelists and gave the vote of thanks.

CG Craig Hall, in his key note remarks said, “The rapidly expanding digital world is one that offers a tremendous opportunity for all countries, and it is critical that we find a way forward that safeguards the significant social and economic benefits already being derived from the digital economy while ensuring an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable cyberspace environment. There are few countries in world with more at stake in getting it right on cybersecurity than India and the United States. The United States is pleased to have India as a key partner in fulfilling this vision for cyberspace.”

Mr. Gulshan Sachdev, in his remarks highlighted the importance of information security in the digital era and reminded everyone that we all are responsible for making the digitization successful. Mr. Amit Malik highlighted the need of cyber security in the era of digitization and how the partnership between corporates and government can bring this to a success.

Mr. Partha Sengupta, Head IT Shared Services ITC, shared his views on how a large and complex manufacturing organization should take care of the complexities of IT and security. He mentioned the growing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in these areas and how an organization’s exposure to various threats are increasing. He also recommended some best practices, which can help organizations to scale without compromising performance.

Mr. Biswajit Maiti, Associate Partner and IT leader at IBM focused on international best practices to help organizations achieve a reasonable, secure environment and remain compliant with the given controls. He also highlighted five simple but effective controls, which is essential to achieve any level of cyber security standards. He specifically mentioned Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will replace the earlier regulation and will help achieve Europe’s goal on cyber security control.

Mr. Somak Shome, Director Cyber Security Practices, PwC, spoke about CEO’s role in cyber security control. He highlighted instances when business goals are different from IT goals and how this can take down the overall performance of the organization. Somak also wondered what tools and resources a common man has at his disposal to face cyber threats, and the steps that the government and industry have to take to achieve a secure digital India. One thing came out very clearly from Somak’s delivery was that in today’s highly competitive world, digitization is the key for an organization’s growth and CEO’s need to own and drive cyber security from the top to make the organizations successful.

Mr. Koushik Nath, Leader Enterprise Network and Data Center Technologies, Cisco Systems, spoke about industry transformations e.g. cloud, social networking, IoT, BYOD, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, and how these are making cyber security challenges more complex. He also highlighted that there would be 50 billion new devices connecting to the internet by 2020 and this will take cyber security challenges to a new level as huge amounts of data will travel across all these devices to the cloud. He demonstrated live how phishing attacks work by spoofing an email address and sending a mail with lucrative offers to the victim. This entire phishing exercise was collaboratively done by Mr. Koushik Nath and Mr. Abir Atarthi, a cyber security analyst working with TCG Digital.