CISO MAG hosted its third Fireside Chat series with Thomas Tschersich, Chief Security Officer (CSO) Deutsche Telekom for a slew of cybersecurity experts comprising of CISOs, CEOs, CIOs and several other senior leaders and executives from U.S., UK, Germany, Bulgaria, and Asia. The topic of the webinar was “Back to a New and Secure Normal.” The Fireside Chat held on May 14, 2020, was moderated by Brian Pereira, Principal Editor of CISO MAG.
The webinar began with an exchange of knowledge between Pereira and Tschersich on the plight of COVID-19 in each of their nations—India and Germany and the preparedness both the countries took in combating the pandemic. Talking about the impact COVID-19 had on Deutsche Telekom, Tschersich recounting the immediate effect of the lockdown that was announced in Germany, narrated, “At that point, our core work was to ensure all the employees who were offsite was brought back to the office. Then came a bigger challenge of setting up computers for thousands of employees with laptops and desktops. The first thing we noticed was that productivity increased. But then our next hurdle was to increase the LAN capacity. There was a lot of positives and negative from the initial experience. Overall, we did well.”
Picking up from there, discussing the lessons that were learnt in the COVID-19 situation, he believed there was both good and bad with the pandemic and the lockdown.
“Unlike the epidemics that we had witnessed before, which were mostly dealt at country or regional level, Coronavirus showed the world what a global pandemic would look like and what damage it can cause.”
According to him the sector which was severely affected was the supply-chain.
“Until the Coronavirus, the world did not know the dependency it had on China, not just the financial sector, but even physical dependency.”
“The biggest learning from the incident was to review our dependency strategy and also look at the supplier of the supply. The best way is to diversify our supply chain to become robust in these kinds of scenario,” he established while stressing that the situation is also an opportunity. “Some call it a crisis, but I call it the biggest digitization process on the planet. If we take the right learning from the crises, we can get stronger out of this.”
Cloud Migration
With COVID-19 several organizations have also started migrating to cloud which was earlier considered apprehensive. “I am sure, for a lot of enterprises, it is safer to have their infrastructure on the cloud than on-premises. Especially small and medium businesses. Secondly, nobody is moving all the workload to a single cloud. There is one for CRM, there is one for finance, there is one for HR. These are more diversified. The main aspect we should be focusing on is creating defenses—we need better security. In fact, zero-trust policies must be a standard in the future,” he added.
During the webinar the audience also took part two snap polls following which Tschersich later took questions from the audience: You can see the results of the snap polls here:
Thomas Tschersich began his career with Deutsche Telekom in 1989 as a telecommunications technician. He then went on to complete his degree in Electrical Power Technology at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. Tschersich then continued to fulfil various roles within Deutsche Telekom before becoming Assistant VP of IT Security and Information Protection for Group Security in 2000, between 2001 and 2007 he was VP of Security Strategy and Policy for Group Security. Tschersich then furthered his career when he was promoted to VP of Technical Security Services for Group Business Security, a role he fulfilled between 2007 and 2009. Afterwards, he took the role as the SVP of Group IT Security Service followed by the role as SVP of Group Security Services. In his last position, Tschersich was the SVP of Internal Security & Cyber Defense at Telekom Security.
Tschersich is also a Member of the Board of Deutschland sicher im Netz and active in numerous advisory functions, including being a member of the Cyber Security Council and the UP Kritis Council.
Following the webinar, five lucky attendees who tweeted about the webinar won a one-year subscription of CISO MAG.
You can watch a recording of the Fireside chat here.
The next Fireside chat on the topic “CISA and cybersecurity in times of a Pandemic” will be held on May 20, 2020, with Bryan Ware, Assistant Director for Cybersecurity for CISA.
Register for the next webinar at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9084986810641579534
Through the Fireside Chat series, CISO MAG will be partnering with industry experts and solution providers from across the world to host similar webinars thrice a month to discuss some of the pressing issues and trends in the cybersecurity. Stay tuned.
About CISO MAG
CISO MAG is a publication from EC-Council, which provides unbiased and useful information to the professionals working to secure critical sectors. The information security magazine includes news, comprehensive analysis, cutting-edge features, and contributions from thought leaders, that are nothing like the ordinary. Within the first year of launch, the magazine reached a global readership of over 50,000 readers. The magazine also has an Editorial Advisory Board that comprises some of the foremost innovators and thought leaders in the cybersecurity space. Apart from this, CISO MAG also presents a platform that reach out to the cybersecurity professionals across the globe through its Summits and Awards and Power List surveys.
About EC-Council
EC-Council, officially incorporated as the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants was formed to create information security training and certification programs to help the very community our connected economy would rely on to save them from a devastating Cyberattack. EC-Council rapidly gained the support of top researchers and subject matter experts around the world and launched its first Information Security Program, the Certified Ethical Hacker. With this ever-growing team of subject matter experts and InfoSec researchers, EC-Council continued to build various standards, certifications and training programs in the electronic commerce and information security space, becoming the largest cybersecurity certification body in the world.