‘CISOs should foster a more security-focused culture’

livemint.com:

Edited excerpts: What are the emerging areas you see in cybersecurity today? The top three evolving areas in cybersecurity according to me are—the use of AI, increasing regulations, and continuous monitoring. Generative AI is clearly big and has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our lives. However, it also poses some security risks, such as data security, model security, bias and privacy.

Organizations can mitigate these risks by following the best practices to ensure that generative AI is used in a safe and responsible manner. Secondly, for securing critical infrastructure, global regulations and standards around cybersecurity should be prioritized. In the US, we’ve got new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on cybersecurity governance and disclosure.

The Indian government recently passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP). All these initiatives aim to protect data principles and restrict the activities of data fiduciaries. We can expect more regulations to come in the coming months, which means that we have to be almost continuously monitoring our security posture.

By ‘continuously monitoring’ an organization’s network and systems, I mean, detecting cyber threats and proactively responding to minimize damage from a data breach or other security incidents. What percentage of the overall tech budget goes to cybersecurity in your organization? Cybersecurity is something we absolutely prioritize and it forms around 10-15% of our overall tech budget. The MongoDB leadership understands the need for investing in a strong security posture and in technologies that can help us stay secure in a changing world.