Melbourne

Cyber attacks are only going to increase in volume and as hackers use more sophisticated means to hit organisations, the need of the hour is to build cyber security for mass markets as it is no longer confirmed to niche markets only, Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, has said.

In an interaction with IANS on the sidelines of CISCO Live' event organised here recently, he said that cyber attacks have gone bigger as the sophistication of threats has gone higher.

"Sophistication of attackers has gone higher than what it was 5 to 7 years back. As technology seems to be going complex, users are seen making mistakes due to which breaches are happening. In this case, we are playing our part by ensuring that we build technology which is simple," Patel said. "The disadvantage with attackers is that they have to be right once but you have to be right every single time," he added. Highlighting the current crisis where cyberattacks and phishing etc have increased significantly, Patel said, "Security needs to be democratised. The entire system needs an overhaul where formal training is required for a user as well. This is because cyber attacks are becoming sophisticated".

"A person receives a packet delivered on Amazon, and that's how phishing attack starts; we need to train administrators, as well as users. Also, software companies need to be trained that they don't make products which have higher friction rate. Instead, simpler products should be made as complexity decreases efficacy while simplification enhances the same," the Cisco executive noted.

Brushing aside the challenges of a slowdown, he said, "We aren't seeing a slowdown, but are busy doing our job by innovating in a better way than we did yesterday. This is the way one can always stay ahead of the market." "Most companies have to think that it is hard to ignore security spend and it is equally hard to ignore people to stay connected, these are core elements on how companies operate so connectivity and security shall stay in demand," he added. On current trends, he said, "Right now, we have no plans of trimming, we are actually doing just the opposite, we are investing in businesses and are growing headcount year on year, but these are things hard to predict what will happen, what we can say is that we need to be sure about success, we need to access customer experience and continue to innovate, bring best people on board and make sure they have the opportunities to keep doing innovation."

Patel emphasised the fact that hybrid working seems to be the order of the day. Speaking on a big transformation being seen from the pre-pandemic to post-pandemic era, he said, "Hybrid working has emerged as a new order of the day. During the pandemic, we flipped overnight and added 1800 features in the first two years. Our innovation went up during this time."

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Now, even as we go hybrid, we continue to innovate, he said, adding that the world will be better if network security, secure connectivity, zero trust, application security and threat detection and response are delivered on time.