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Safer Internet Day: What Experts Say on Creating a Better and Safer Internet

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With the cyberspace becoming a breeding ground for hackers and cyber criminals, particularly in the ongoing pandemic times, the number one priority for people and organizations is to keep their information safe online.

Every year, Safer Internet Day arrives in early February to remind us all just how important it is to protect our digital information and assets in an ever-evolving virtual world. With its roots in Europe since 2004, it began as an initiative of the EU-funded SafeBorders project. Over the years, however, it has become an annual worldwide event celebrated in more than 180 countries to raise awareness on Internet safety and the need for digital literacy.

This year’s theme is “Together for a better internet” and to mark the occasion, CXOToday speaks to some experts who talk about the importance of Safer Internet Day for the enterprise and explain how to make the internet a safer and better place for all.

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“Safer Internet Day has never been more important than this year. The initial cybersecurity scramble caused by the pandemic is now a thing of the past, and businesses and employees everywhere have successfully adapted to the changes it brought. However, in 2022, we face a new problem: remaining secure while hybrid working becomes increasingly more prevalent in our professional lives. Employees will continue to connect to corporate networks from a wide variety of devices, via various internet connections ranging from home networks, café Wi-Fi and offices. And so far, cyber criminals have been taking full advantage: with a triple digit increase in cyber attacks seen in the first half of last year alone. The threat of ransomware, impact of misinformation, and phishing scams should be top of mind for information security professionals, employees, and consumers alike. Awareness and a basic understanding of the threats is the basis for the importance of Safer Internet Day in 2022. An increased focus on ensuring that security is front-and-centre of both consumers’ and employees’ minds. Putting cybersecurity at the top of their list of priorities – keeping themselves and the businesses they work for safe.” Anthony Di Bello, Vice President, Strategic Development at OpenText

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“Modern cyberattacks, data leaks, and ransomware outbreaks have all revealed the same thing: cybersecurity is failing. This failure is the result of weak technologies and human mistakes caused by clever social engineering. In cases where a backup solution was working well and wasn’t compromised, it usually would take hours and days to restore systems (with data) to an operational state. Backup is essential for when cybersecurity solutions fail; but at the same time, backup solutions can be compromised, disabled, and perform slowly, causing businesses to lose a lot of money due to downtime. To solve these problems, we recommend integrated cyber protection solutions that combine antimalware, EDR, DLP, email security, vulnerability assessment, patch management, RMM, and backup capabilities into a single agent running under a family of Windows operating systems. This integration lets you maintain optimal performance, eliminate compatibility issues, and ensure rapid recovery. If a threat is missed or detected while your data is being altered, the data will be restored from a backup immediately – because of its one agent, it knows that data was lost and needed to be restored. This isn’t possible with an antimalware agent separate from a backup product with its own agent. Your antimalware solution may stop the threat, but some data may already be lost. A backup agent won’t know about it automatically and, in the best case scenario, data will be restored slowly — if at all. Kevin Reed, CISO, Acronis

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“Data is one of the most valuable assets for all organizations, as the insights collected from personal data and analytics drive innovation and a competitive edge in the market. However, data privacy has become a growing worry, with personal information at increased risk. India was recently ranked third in the world in terms of the number of data breaches, with a total of 86.63 million Indian users breached till November 2021. Online privacy is underestimated as individuals are not aware of how much information is being shared externally – not just on social networks but through internet browsing as well.  With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation in leaps and bounds, data privacy and data protection are critical factors to protect business and customer data from cyber threats or human error. So, to bring transparency and accountability, businesses must first improve on their policy communication and practice transparency in data use. As an additional step, organizations should also appoint data champions like a Chief Data Officer (CDO) to advocate data literacy and remove the stigmas and bottlenecks around data across the workforce. As we step into a more connected world, our decisions will become even more data-driven, and so it is imperative to establish a set of rules and policies around data privacy and promote data literacy, to minimize the risk of data breaches from cyber threats and human errors.” – Varun Babbar, Managing Director, Qlik, India

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“Data privacy and data security go hand-in-hand. Companies seeking to develop secure and private applications are challenged with massive amounts of data that can erode performance. To overcome this challenge companies focused on fraud prevention and who wish to respond to emerging fraud patterns require a high-performance real-time database built explicitly to run on flash and Persistent Memory (PMem), not DRAM, while consistently delivering speed at scale. Cybersecurity challenges are complex and there’s no silver bullet to creating a better and safer internet. It is only through the concerted efforts by the government, organizations and individuals that we can raise awareness on internet safety and encourage safe, responsible and positive use of digital technologies.” – Aveekshith Bushan, Regional Director & General Manager – Asia Pacific, Aerospike


“The global pandemic necessitated many SMEs to take their businesses online, thereby requiring them to also pay attention to security for their business websites, helping to protect them from vulnerabilities and threats. This makes it critical for SMEs to choose their hosting partners carefully for those that can provide a more secure online experience, including for example: security tools, system updates, password protection and monitors their websites continuously. We at GoDaddy, offer both 24/7 monitoring and quick response time, along with solutions, which includes anti-virus, anti–spam and firewall protections for optimum safety. Moreover, our services include comprehensive protection through Website Security, SSL Certificates, Back-up & Restore, Firewall, and CDN as a bundled security solution package for budding businesses. These prominent security solutions help build greater customer trust as it demonstrates the website and business legitimacy. GoDaddy continues to support Indian small businesses and entrepreneurs with an integrated suite of online tools and solutions with security protections, that are easy to use and affordable.”  Nikhil Arora, Vice President and Managing Director, GoDaddy India


“In last couple of years, lines between work and personal life have blurred as our homes doubled up as our offices too. As we settle into anywhere work experience, enterprises need to understand the importance of data privacy practices as a strong foundation for cybersecurity controls. This can be done by including robust vulnerability management, implementing multi-factor authentication, threat hunting, and network micro-segmentation, among others. At VMware, we understand that strong security posture and protection of personal data inspire customer and employee trust, enhance customer experience, and benefit one and all. We encourage everyone in the organization to be privacy-first champions and we are committed to privacy-by-design when we deliver our products and services that solve complex business problems for our customers and partner organizations. We also believe that Security solution need to be Simpler, Faster and Smarter and we advise our customers to rethink security as an intrinsic and distributed part of the modern enterprise—continuously incorporating all aspects of their technology stack to deliver effective security through a Zero Trust approach.” – Pankaj Shukla, Director – Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Business at VMware India

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Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]