Today, we are joined by Vernon Yai, a distinguished data protection expert specializing in the intricate worlds of privacy protection and data governance. As an established thought leader, his work focuses on pioneering new risk management strategies and developing innovative detection techniques to safeguard our most sensitive information in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Our conversation will explore the strategic imperatives driving modern cybersecurity, as security leaders increasingly turn to hybrid infrastructures to bolster resilience and navigate the maze of global compliance. We’ll delve into the critical, yet often misunderstood, convergence of IT and operational technology, and discuss the practical challenges of managing shared responsibilities in multicloud environments. Finally, we will touch upon the harsh lessons from recent catastrophic cyberattacks and consider how the role of the CISO must evolve to meet the demands of this new era.
The report found that 97% of CISOs see hybrid models as vital for data sovereignty and compliance. Beyond just checking a box for regulators, can you share a specific example of how a hybrid setup actively insulates a company from a localized cyberattack and improves daily business continuity?
Absolutely. It’s one thing to talk about this in theory, but it’s another to live through it. Imagine a multinational manufacturing firm with its primary on-premises data center in Europe, which handles enterprise resource planning. A sophisticated ransomware attack hits that specific location, encrypting local servers and bringing administrative functions to a standstill. In a non-hybrid world, this could be a company-ending event. However, with a smart hybrid model, the most critical production and supply chain data is replicated in a private cloud instance located in North America, subject to different data sovereignty laws. While the European office is in crisis mode, the North American operations, which rely on that separate instance, can continue functioning. Furthermore, they might have air-gapped systems containing the ‘golden image’ of their OT controllers, allowing them to restore factory operations far more quickly. It’s not just about failover; it’s about intelligent segmentation that contains the blast radius of an attack, turning a potential catastrophe into a manageable, albeit serious, regional incident.
With 96% of leaders viewing IT/OT convergence as essential, what steps should a CISO take to bridge the understanding gap with executives who may not grasp the unique security differences? Could you outline a few key metrics that effectively communicate the distinct risks of each environment?
This is one of the most pressing challenges CISOs face today. The fact that two out of every five leaders don’t grasp the difference is a flashing red light on the corporate dashboard. The key is to stop talking about firewalls and start talking about factory floors. You have to translate the risk into dollars and downtime. Instead of presenting vulnerability scan results, present metrics like ‘Revenue at Risk per Hour of OT Stoppage’ versus ‘Cost of a Customer Data Breach.’ For IT, a critical metric might be ‘Time to Detect a Data Exfiltration Event.’ For OT, it’s ‘Mean Time to Restore Production After a Control System Failure.’ You can also create powerful visual aids, showing a compromised assembly line grinding to a halt, with a running tally of lost production value, juxtaposed with the more abstract concept of stolen customer records. The goal is to make the physical, kinetic risk of an OT failure feel as real and financially devastating to the board as a massive data breach.
Michael Green of Trellix highlighted the need to understand the shared responsibility model. Can you walk us through a common mistake companies make when managing this model in a multicloud environment and detail the governance processes needed to ensure consistent security posture and visibility?
A classic and frankly dangerous mistake is what I call ‘cloud complacency.’ An organization migrates a workload to a major cloud provider and the leadership team breathes a sigh of relief, assuming the provider’s world-class security team is now handling everything. They completely overlook the fact that the provider secures the cloud, but the customer is responsible for securing what’s in the cloud—the data, the configurations, the access controls. This gap is where attackers thrive. To combat this, as Michael Green noted, you need robust governance designed for a hybrid world. This means implementing a centralized Cloud Security Posture Management tool that gives you a single pane of glass across all your environments—AWS, Azure, on-prem, you name it. This provides that consistent visibility. The governance process then involves creating universal security policies, or guardrails, that are automatically enforced regardless of where a new service is spun up. It’s about building a consistent, visible, and automated security fabric that stretches across your entire hybrid estate.
The article mentions the massive disruption at Jaguar Land Rover. When building a resilience strategy for a hybrid environment, what are the top three technical controls or processes you would implement to prevent a similar prolonged outage, and how would you regularly test their effectiveness?
An outage lasting over a month with a $2.5 billion impact is a CISO’s worst nightmare and a clear failure of resilience. To prevent that, my top three priorities would be architecting for resilience from the ground up. First, radical segmentation using the hybrid model itself. This means designing your infrastructure so that a compromise in one zone—say, corporate IT—cannot cascade into critical OT or supply chain management systems hosted in a separate, secure cloud environment. Second, immutable, air-gapped backups for all critical systems. These aren’t just regular backups; they are offline, cannot be altered, and provide a known-good state to which you can restore, completely insulating you from ransomware. Third, and most importantly, is relentless and realistic testing. This goes beyond simple disaster recovery drills. We need to conduct full-scale business continuity simulations that mimic a real-world attack, forcing teams to failover production systems, communicate without primary networks, and execute the response plan under extreme pressure. You test this quarterly, with different attack scenarios, to build muscle memory and expose the flaws in your plan before an attacker does.
What is your forecast for how the CISO’s role will evolve as IT/OT convergence and complex hybrid infrastructures become the undisputed standard for enterprises over the next few years?
The CISO of the near future will be less of a technologist and more of a business strategist and risk architect. The conversation is fundamentally shifting from “How do we stop malware?” to “How do we ensure the business remains resilient in the face of catastrophic disruption?” As IT and OT continue to merge, the CISO will need to be just as comfortable discussing supply chain logistics and manufacturing uptime as they are discussing endpoint detection. Their primary function will be to translate the complex tapestry of hybrid risk into a clear business case for resilience investment, using examples like the massive financial fallout from the Jaguar Land Rover incident as a stark warning. Ultimately, the most successful CISOs will be those who sit firmly at the intersection of technology, risk, and business operations, becoming indispensable advisors who enable the company to innovate securely in an increasingly hostile world.
