Phil: A day in the life of a Chief Information Security Officer
1. Phil: A day in the life of a Chief Information Security Officer
Cloud's a great democratizer of talent, so anybody can go to work straight away in the cloud, get access to a large array of technology that's a lot easier to use than it used to be, and so a lot more people can have a lot more skills and capability by building on the cloud. Hi, I'm Phil. I'm Chief Information Security Officer at Google Cloud. The role of a chief information security officer is really to be in charge of many different types of risks, whether it's security, privacy, compliance. It's mostly internal facing, making sure what we build for our customers is secure and compliant, but also a large part of it is working with our customers, helping them build on our platform in secure ways. I started in the 1990s in cybersecurity, and like a lot of people in my generation, we kind of stumbled into doing this, so it was not something I set out to do. I was a software engineer building many different types of systems. Ultimately started developing secure systems at the beginning of the internet and the beginning of a lot of critical uses of the internet, and I stayed doing that ever since. Probably the main thing about why I kind of find cybersecurity exciting is it's just that the ability to just work across everything a company does. And so every single day is different because you're involved in different product launches, you're involved in different geopolitical situations, you're involved in new technologies, and so it's just the breadth and diversity of what we do that's really exciting. When you think about cybersecurity in the context of cloud, it's really an opportunity to get security right. So what we've done in the cloud is we've designed security so that it's built in, not bolted on after the fact. And for many organizations that move to the cloud, it's their first opportunity to get security right because we've architected it in, and I think that's a tremendous moment of transformation for many organizations. The great thing about cloud technology is it permits businesses of all sizes to be able to grow. A small startup business can tap into the cloud and get the scale of capability that was previously only available to major corporations, and that's a tremendous competitive edge for those companies. So cloud's gonna keep evolving. Again, every customer that comes onto cloud, every organization that comes onto cloud has new ideas about what they want cloud to be, and a cloud provider, we're constantly taking that feedback, building new technologies, field testing it with customers, and they give us even more feedback, so it's like a great flywheel that's propelling the innovation forward. In cybersecurity, we really look for people who can collaborate in teams, maintain curiosity, and deliver on that mission of protecting our customers. If you want to get started in a career in cybersecurity, I would say the important and perhaps obvious thing is just to take that first step. So any of us that have been in this field a long time, at one point we knew nothing about it and we took that first step. Watching that first YouTube video, taking that first certificate, taking that first class, downloading that first toolkit and playing around with things. The important thing is to just take the first step, and then the next one and the next one, and don't get overwhelmed. Just take those things one step at a time.2. Let's practice!
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