CXO Leadership Series: Mr. Balaji Venketeshwar, Executive Director, Cyber Security Engineering at PricewaterhouseCoopers

With an aim to bridge the gap between industry and students, TAPMI continued its CXO Leadership Series with Mr. Balaji Venketeshwar- Executive Director, Cyber Security Engineering at PricewaterhouseCoopers. The theme of the Leadership talk is “Disruptive Innovation: Opportunities and threat.” He started his talk with three aspects of disruptive technology i.e. innovation, trends, and challenges. He emphasized the need of being innovative i.e. how to be innovative and how to foster innovation in your team. According to him, the innovation in technology or any other field can only be achieved with persistence efforts by an individual and also the entire team. He also demonstrated “Prediction tree” to elucidate the fact that how technology will evolve and what impact it will have on our lives.

He proceeded his talk with an insightful discussion on the existing and emerging trend in technology around the world. In terms of the existing trends, he illustrated that the technology companies can easily get information on networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter through users’ digital footprints and on various search engines.

He also talked about the emerging trends such as the Quantum Computers which is expected to completely revolutionize the every aspect of technology. For example, all cryptography designs usually remain in such a way that reverse engineering takes countless days ( sentence incorrect), but Quantum Computers could do it in no time. By highlighting the 15 Information Technology Industry Trends such as mobility, security, IOT, Lean agile process, Personalization, Robotics, 3D digitization, Artificial Intelligence, Augment Reality, Connected world etc. he explained that our future is heading towards a better, but also complex world. And this complexity will result in some serious threats.

He continued the discussion with an argument that innovation will always have side effects, and it can be used in negative ways. He supported his argument by stating the fact of increased number of cyber crimes. This involves terrorist attack, cyber threats in banking, cyber criminals, hacktivists etc.

At last, he concluded that there would be threats with an increase in innovation, but we should make ourselves robust enough to face the threat. He said, “Innovation distinguish between leader and follower. It’s an idea, power of imagination, it requires vision, brings excellence, and leads to invention.” He ended the session with motivational words, “You are an innovator, Re-invent yourself.”