Manufacturing CIO Round table powered by Redington and SecurID
#CyberSecurity #StrategicApproach #RoundtablePro MFG Media is proud to announce the success of Manufacturing Leadership Round table powered by Redington India Ltd and RSA Security on the topic Building Cyber Resilience Enterprise – Cyber Risk a strategic Priority which was held on 4th June, 2021. This roundtable was attended by senior leaders and industry experts who laid emphasis on mitigating cybersecurity risks that organizations face today.
With Industry 4.0, risks and identity is the most attacked vector today. It calls out industry experts to lay greater emphasis on cyber security and come up with strategic business solutions and enormous implications in financial, reputational, and regulatory segments. Cyber security should be an enabler, rather than a barrier to, capturing and extending value in the digital economy.
Charles Lim, Director – South East Asia, RSA Security set the tone for the Round Table. He said: “Since the global pandemic; the lives of people have been impacted. With periodic lockdowns, businesses have been affected and things have nearly come to a halt. However, cyberspace has been very active and we’ve seen an increase of approximately 10x in terms of e-commerce transactions over the internet. This has led to a rise in cyber attacks; and over the last year alone, we witnessed close to about 116 million identities being attacked, or being compromised. It’s an alarming figure. The most common was the phishing attacks where the hackers were crafting emails around Covid-19; trying to phish credentials and entities.”
According to Lim, towards the end of 2020, and the beginning of 2021, a huge spike of attempted attacks was on the life sciences, and pharmaceutical manufacturing organizations. Since its cyberspace, tracking, and identifying the specific attacker will always be a challenge.
The discussion moved forwards where everyone reflected upon their experiences and challenges faced. Mr. Siddharth Vishwanath, Partner, Cyber Security Leader, PwC India; moderated the session and engaged the CIO leaders on various subject matters.
Throwing light on the pharma industry, and challenges met, Mr. Sanjay Nandavadekar, Director- IT, Cipla said: “Pandemic has given hackers a reason to target data and in pharmaceutical-the vital patient data. According to me, targeting personal data at a large juncture is where hackers are focusing nowadays. Apart from that, financial data and other vital data like your intellectual properties, formulas of the pharmaceutical companies, are areas where they would be targeting and trying to phish some ransom attacks.”
Speaking on the chemical industry, Mr. Deepak Keni, EVP- Special Projects and Enablers, Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals; said: “When we look at industrial chemicals, fertilizers and petrochemical industry; our data mainly revolves around corporate data, which is strategic information from our company. So there comes a dire need to protect that. We need to protect our consumers who are farmers - so consumer protection and consumer data is highly important followed by data of rules and regulations. Our R&D data which has now progressed to IoT, likewise cloud data, manufacturing data etc. has become important for us from a security management perspective.”
Adding to the subject line, Mr. Pankaj Shrivastava, Head- IT, Gujarat Fluorochemicals, said: “We are into manufacturing of bulk chemicals, gases and specialty chemicals. During the pandemic; cyber attacks had increased a lot as phishing happened through social media, different kinds of emails, etc. So adhering to this problem, we immediately executed preventive measures like we tightened the security of gateways and we segregated data into segments like network, R&D and other data. Our cyber security team has worked 24/7 to ensure the security quotient and to mitigate the risk.” Being always alert is the key message from Pankaj.
Highlighting post COVID resilience within the organization; and fast forward adoption of cloud, Mr. Pavithran Ayyala, CIDO, Neuland Laboratories; said: “Factories today are a combination of many products from various OEMs; and having to deal with multiple vendors and partners, is one of the key challenges. With increased use of IOT enabled sensors, which pushes the data to the cloud, it brings in risk. So as a part of cyber resilience and mitigating the impact, learning about risks from cyber attacks is very important. One should evaluate on a periodic basis, to understand and continue to work on that on regular intervals. With digital transformation, we need to understand the risks when we connect machines to the cloud as it could directly impact our operations and uptime.”
Focusing on investment from a cybersecurity perspective Mr. Rajesh Panchal, CIO, Punjab Chemicals and Crop Protection, said: “Especially in manufacturing there’s a dire need to understand different kinds of threats and we observed identity theft, phishing, spamming and compromised web pages. There needs to be detailed awareness campaigns run within organizations. We have invested in communication, posters, awareness drives, education, as well as a minimum social media network in our organization. We have also decided to change our password policy. Almost 75- 80% of the resources are working from home and therefore we need to protect the IPs, information credentials of the organization and therefore we have strongly activated monitoring of logs.”
When it comes to fighting the cyber threat actors; Mr. Vilas Pujari, CIO, ACG Worldwide, spoke about collaboration and asserted: “Ensuring that we are well protected is an important thing but there are certain barriers that we should take care of. For example if we are handling these challenges individually, we will still be able to win, but the cost of that will be higher and all industry leaders, organizations will be repeating the same thing over and over again. We need to come forward and share the information and this information sharing is going to collectively reduce the risk and cost for many of us.”
Mr. Siddharth Vishwanath added on the subject and said: “We should share information with each other, as for example if I'm breached there’s a detailed breach investigation with identified set of indicators of compromise. If I don't share it with other industry peers, the possibility of the same vector of attack is higher. So taking a collaborative approach to combat threats thoroughly is the way forward.”
The event concluded with a summarisation by Mr. Charles Lim and a vote of thanks to all the participants for their valuable knowledge-sharing.
Redington
Redington commenced its Indian operations in 1993. Today it is positioned as the largest IT Supply Chain Solution Provider. It has been quite a vast and inspiring journey for them, emerging from one brand, one product category, and one market into a US $7.3 billion distribution and solutions provider to over 230+ international brands in IT and Mobility spaces, serving 37 emerging markets. With its corporate office in Chennai, Redington has 81 Sales offices, 220 warehouses with 6000+ Partners and a team of over 1800 highly skilled and committed professionals. With it’s vast presence in India, Middle East and Africa, and Singapore regions they provide customers with global capabilities and international expertise.
One of their long standing relationships has been with RSA since the year 2010. Redington enjoys the maximum market share for RSA with about 12 million (USD) business annually, working very closely with the channel partners with their count increasing year on year.
NEWSLETTER
TRENDING ON PRO MFG
MORE FROM THE SECTION
