It’s not many times that one comes across a leader who effectively handles two seemingly conflicting roles – CTO and CISO. When merged together, a chief technology and information security officer has the challenging task of balancing two roles that often have different priorities.
On one hand, the CTO role focuses primarily on innovation, which often calls for taking new risk, while the CISO works hard to mitigate the risks. And as someone who has been handing this dual role for over two decades, Sujoy Brahmachari, CTISO of USE Group has a different perpective to put together. He believes that security and innovation should go hand-in-hand.
“Security is not an after-thought in today’s digital world and is part of organizations’ product development process. Having a single leadership for both security and development teams has proven to be a great advantage for me. The teams have better understanding and bonding,” he says.
He further reiterates that periodic risk analysis and mitigation strategy is as important as the organization’s innovation strategy.
He believes that AI-powered automation will further enrich the area of security in 2023, in terms of improving insights and productivity of the teams. “Doing a post-mortem of a security incident isn’t sufficient to minimize and mitigate risks. Security needs to move from the reactive mode to a proactive mode. AI and ML are playing a vital role in the area of proactive alerts and advance correction,” he adds.
In addition to investing on security and risk mitigation, technology leaders in the country will look at key areas such as smarter devices, AI/ML and datafication, he sums up.
