#LTWConnects 2020 | accelerateHER Live: Cyber Security and the Future of Work

Hello and welcome to those of you who've just joined us. I'm Laura Stebbing, co CEO of AccelerateHear. I'm incredibly excited to introduce this next panel on cybersecurity and the future of our work. Our world of work seems to be changing by the hour and these incredible women will dig into how we all go forward securely. I'm delighted to introduce our wonderful moderator and Accelerate, her board member, Dr. Hayyatan Salem. Dr. Hayyattan is the Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She's a Trustee of Engineering uk, member of the Made Smarter Commission and Chair of the Strategic Advisory group for the UKRI's Circular Economy Program. She's been named one of the most inspiring 50 women in tech and one of the most influential women in engineering. She was made a CVE in 2019. Ayatan, I'm delighted to hand over to you.

Thanks so much, Laura. And hi everyone. Thank you all for joining us. It's really my great pleasure to introduce to you two exceptional panelists. Now don't say we're not spoiling you today. So first up we have Canadian born Michelle Zaplin, who co founded the web performance and security company Cloudflare with CEO Matthew Prince, who she met at Harvard Business School and his friend Lee Holloway. Cloudflare has seen, I think it's fair to say, explosive growth since it was founded in 2009 and now has a reported valuation of $3.5 billion and has over 700 employees. Next up we have Poppy Gustafson, who is the CEO of the award winning cyber AI company Darktrace, which under leadership has flourished. It's reached a $1.65 billion valuation in under five years and has also been named Europe's 9th fastest growing European company by the Financial Times as well as fastest growing super scale up by Tector. We have fantastic panelists for you today. So I'd like to open Poppy and Michelle by just acknowledging the fact that we're all participating in this in a slightly different way to the way we usually would. And the world of work has changed profoundly overnight. Remote working, online communication is now a really core part of our lives and the prospect of returning to the office as we knew it before seems pretty unrealistic. So can you tell me what does this mean for your businesses? And I'll start with Michelle and then turn to you, Poppy.

Yes, you know, there was definitely a pre Covid work environment at cloudflare. We had 16 offices around the world. We used to have 700 people. Now we have about over 1300. And we were a company where we came into work every single day. And as Covid became a global pandemic almost overnight, we went from a company where we were coming into one of these 16 offices every single day to 1300 people working from home. And that was a big shift for us. And what you know, we're a very engineering driven company and what we like to remind ourselves is that systems get better, that are constrained. And one of the things that we've really seen is all of a sudden where we went from an in office company to all at home, how amazing our team has adapted, how our systems has actually gotten better and there's actually some things we now do better as a result of all this as a company. And that when we enter the post Covid world, and I think there's a question mark of when that is we've adopted the language internally at Cloudflare of hey, when are we not going back to normal? We're using hey, how are we going back to better? We do expect a post Covid world, but this idea of the things we've learned these last few months where we've had constrained and had to innovate and make some things better, how do we take that as we carry forward and what are the long term impacts of that? So those are some of the reflections that I've seen at my company.

Thanks, Michelle. A nice positive take on how we can build that better. Poppy, how about you? How does it feel over at Darktrace?

Yeah, very similar. And creating that new sort of business as usual is something that we've all had to face with. But one of the things that I found really striking is the role that technology has played in that transformation. And overnight we've seen businesses where we've all become accustomed that you go into your office and you sit at your desk and you work and you collaborate by seeing people there in front of you to ones that work remotely. And tech is the thing that has enabled that to happen for many of us. Whether it's these great video call facilities, such as one we're using today, or whether it's your VPN infrastructure that means that you can access exactly the same systems that you can from home as you did when you're in the office to, let's face it, like your delivery systems that mean you can still get an interesting lunch and your lunch break rather than having to cook everything yourself. Like these are. These are all pivotal parts of what has enabled our businesses to transform themselves. But what's also becoming really apparent is that we're going to have in this post Covid world a far, far increased reliance on technology. Which is why for myself and Michelle, understanding how we protect that, whether it's from cybersecurity otherwise, is a sort of really, really important thing both today, but also in the future. Because technology is going to become such a even key part of that infrastructure that all of us rely on.

Absolutely. I mean, I think most of us have been quite astonished at what a collective transformation we've gone through in terms of the adoption of digital tools really across all parts of society. But you raise a really important point which is that with all these benefits, of course we have to be consc of what's happening out there in terms of cyber attacks. And I'm very interested to know, as two world leading experts in this topic, what is your perspective on how the pandemic has changed cyber security for business? What trends are you seeing? And maybe I'll go to Poppy first this time.

I mean, it'd be great, it'd be great to say that the cyber hackers have taken some time off as they're working from home, but it's not the case. And the sort of level of activity that we're seeing has been very significant, if not, if not increased over this time. Where we have our internal IT systems who were originally very under resourced and very stretched are even more so. And the hackers, they don't care how they get access or a foothold into a potential targets environment. Whether it's through websites or emails or through your SaaS environment or whatever it is, they don't care how it is. They just constantly look for that weakest link in that chain. And when that chain is being stretched even more so because overnight rushed IT teams are suddenly worrying about how they can get everyone connected to the systems. And perhaps cybersecurity isn't front and foremost or you've got employees that are very quickly trying to download some new and interesting video conferencing software or the latest food delivery app or whatever it is to enable them to work from home. Perhaps they're sort of going around your standard IT protocols and systems which is increasing the level of vulnerabilities. So there's more opportunity for those, for the hackers to sort of try and get that foothold into the business. Another good example is the sort of spear phishing emails and a lot of malware is coming and being introduced to business where they're sending some very highly targeted emails to individuals leveraging Covid. And IT could be emails such as, hey, click here for latest information from government policy on coronavirus. And when, when this is important information that you need in real time and quickly that your people are far more likely to start clicking on those links and doing those things that they wouldn't necessarily normally do. So, yes, we're seeing a significant increase in those types of emails and attacks.

Michelle, I'd be interested to know if that's what you're seeing and also perhaps to give us a bit of an insight into how much you think businesses are now acknowledging and responding to this, this new pattern of threat and this, you know, the increased vulnerability that's come with the widespread adoption and the remote working and so forth.

Yes, yes, no, we, we are seeing something very similar that, that Poppy outlined that she's seeing at Darktrace. So if you step back. So Cloudflare, we have 27 million Internet properties that use our service. And cybersecurity is one of the services that we help provide those Internet properties that, so we have. We. We have a lot of customers around the world. And what we have seen as this pandemic has happened is increase in online traffic, which makes sense. All of a sudden, everyone's at home, they're accessing the Internet. And by a huge increase, by more than 50%, almost every country around the world, some, some have more than doubled, but it is. We have it by country. The traffic is up everywhere around the world, which makes sense because people are at home. And as Poppy very eloquently said, technology is kind of holding us together. People are finding things to do online, and so that makes sense. And as Poppy also pointed out, sadly, the cyber attacks are also up. So much more Internet traffic from legitimate users, all of us finding ways to use the Internet and technology in their everyday lives. But the cyber attacks are also up during this time. Can you imagine if you're a business and all of a sudden you're already dealing with having your employees working from home. Do I have a strong enough digital first presence? And now you also have to be like, oh, and I can't forget about cybersecurity, because attacks are up. It's a lot for the IT teams within these companies who are holding this all together. And the real heroes of this pandemic are obviously the medical responders. But I do think behind the scenes, the trustee side kick are all of the network security and the IT folks who are holding the Internet together behind the scenes because we are really relying on it. And so cyber attacks are also up. And the way they're up is it's less really large attacks, it's much more kind of small, medium sized attacks across a broad swath of businesses, both medium sized businesses and large businesses. And so that means they have to make sure that they have a firewall in front of them or something to just. A lot of these attacks are automated bots looking for a vulnerability. It's the weakest link that Poppy described and so you need something to protect you from that and if not, you will be the weakest link and they'll find it. So that's one thing that we've seen and as Poppy pointed out, the spear phishing, where it's these sophisticated Covid related emails that look very real and employees trying to do the right thing or get the latest information and accidentally clicking on a link that has malware also is on the rise as something that we've also been seeing. The third thing that the third trend we've seen is because all of a sudden businesses found themselves with employees working from home. If they were using a traditional VPN that was a hardware vpn, a lot of them could not sustain so many concurrent connections and so they almost fell over. And so we've also seen a lot of businesses say, oh wow, we need some sort of cloud VPN service that can help scale them up or down. That's another very technical trend that we've seen among larger organizations where they just weren't used to having their whole workforce at home all of a sudden and so quickly. And so it's certainly an extraordinary time and businesses are dealing with a lot and you know, unfortunately cyber security is still one of those things that they have to pay attention to.

Yeah, there's been a huge amount of concurrent adaption that we will adaptation. We've all had to be doing. Interested? Michelle, you've got a very diverse user base and in particular you've got a very interesting initiative called Project Galileo, which as I understand it, is coming up to its sixth anniversary and I think it'd be really fascinating to hear a bit more about that. Can you tell us what that's about?

Yes, yes. Project Galileo is one of those things that I am so proud of and I think many people at Cloudflare are very proud of and the premise is the following. Cloudflare, again, 27 million Internet properties. A lot of those are large organizations that we have all heard of like Mars and l' Oreal that use Cloudflare. Cloudflare and they pay us a fee to do that. And they're businesses, so they have the budget and then we also have a service for a lot of small businesses and they pay us a little bit of money, like $20 a month, which again, that aligns. But what we realized was there is a group of what I would call as at risk public interest organizations that actually have needs like they are a large enterprise, but have resources like they are a very small company. And that's why we created Project Galileo. It's for these at risk public interest organizations who are doing, are helping put forward something that's very important to the public. But often they come under large, large cyber attacks. And so these are sites that organizations that potentially are trying to fight for LGBQ rights in the Middle east or right now anti racial sites around the world, or they're journalists reporting on human rights, human rights abuses in parts of the world where there's a lot of conflict. And these are important voices to have online. But sadly they often are trying to be silenced by someone who doesn't like what they're saying. And so what Project Galileo is, it gives our enterprise grade service, which again large organizations pay for a large fee for free to these at risk public interest sites. And we have over 1,000 organizations around the world who are part of this program and we're really proud of it. As you said, it's our sixth anniversary, it was yesterday, of just protecting these sorts of organizations. And so today you can imagine the last few months we've seen a lot of organizations with COVID related initiatives that are trying to help the societies and they operate, including one in London called Zoe which partnered with the King's College out of London to help Symptom trackers, tractors for anybody. And they went from very little usage to a million usage overnight. And they need something that makes it fast, safe and reliable. Again, they're not a business, but they need a service like Cloudflare. And so that's a great example of something that we do as part of Project Galileo and we feel really proud to help put these voices and have this, these voices online.

Well, congratulations on your sixth anniversary and it really is an incredibly important initiative, so congratulations on that too. And Poppy, I'd like to turn to you now for a minute. Darktrace is of course a world leading AI company in the context of cybersecurity. And I think lots of us are quite oblivious to what AI has been doing to keep us safe in cyberspace during the pandemic. Would you like to tell us a bit about that?

Yes, yes, of course. And first, just to echo the sentiment there on that project, Michelle, I think that's a really exciting initiative and a sort of good, strong inspiration for a lot of us. So AI, AI for us underpins everything that we do. And at our heart, we see ourselves as an artificial intelligence company. And what we love about AI is it allows, it allows a technology to learn what makes a business unique. And that learning changes over time. So if you take what we do at darktrace, we will go into an organization and understand its unique sort of digital fingerprints what makes that business completely original. And then by knowing the behavior of that business, you can then spot when that changes, which could be symptomatic of a cyber breach. And not only to be able to identify that, but to be able to respond to that breach in real time. Now, if you look at the way that the business world has changed over the past few months and has been transformed overnight, AI has formed a really significant part of being able to relearn and evolve as those businesses change and adapt. And let's be honest, there's going to be another round of adaption when we go back to offices, if that ever does. But I suspect there's going to be a series of big shifts in the business world over the next year or so. At least AI allows us to learn with those changes and very quickly relearn what that business now looks like in that new environment. So that's a very big part of what we do and underpins a lot of our technology offering.

So that's a fantastic example of why AI is a great force for good. Now, of course, we have to acknowledge that some people have their anxieties about aspects of AI. And with talking here at AccelerateHER Live, our community has a big interest in issues to do with diversity and inclusion and bias. And when it comes to the topic of AI and bias, I'd be really interested to hear your reflections, Poppy, maybe Michelle too, if you'd like to join in afterwards and to kind of try and shed a little bit of light on something that is, I think, subject to some quite polarized views. In your view, Poppy, in your very well informed view, how can we continue to ensure that algorithms are as inclusive as possible, effective and inclusive, and ensure that AI is a leveling force rather than something that replays and reinforces inequality. So, yeah, really, really interested to hear what you think about that.

And it's an interesting challenge. And how do you, how do you teach AI in a way that still allows it to maintain an agnostic position? That's sort of fact based on the Information it sees in front of us on the basis of what we do, we're in a fortunate position where we're not training our AI, we're not saying, hey, this is what we bad looks like, this is what an attacker looks like, this is what a cyber threat looks like. And then teaching the AI that we're going in and it's unsupervised machine learning that just goes in and says, what does this business look like? We don't try and teach it good or bad. It just goes in and observes. And based on what it sees, it thinks, okay, this is allowing me to build up an understanding of the pattern of life for that particular organization. So we are able to very carefully, because we're not teaching it in that way, we're allowed in our scenario to sort of remove any of that bias. But yes, any situation where you are training AI or the machine learning using sort of vast historic data sets, your challenge is a lot of that. You will inherit preconceptions that exist in those data sets, and the challenge of how you unpick that is going to become a very real one. But I think fundamentally, for any business that is deploying AI or using AI as problem solving, there's a big journey there to trust that AI and to trust the decisions that it makes, to understand the decisions it makes. It cannot be a black box that simply presents an answer you need to you as a consumer, as the human on the receiving end, needs to understand the decisions and the steps that have been made as part of that so that you will build up a trust and an understanding in that, and then you can sort of shortcut that. The example I often use is you think about, for many of us, we have smartphones. I'm sure those people watching this at home, there's a smartphone next to you, many of you may be watching it on smartphones, and you don't know how it works in the background. You don't know the algorithms that are there, but you have experience of it giving you the information that you need as and when you need it. And as a consequence, you have built up a trust in that asset. And that's the same, I think, for any businesses out there that are using AI or want to leverage AI within their own technologies, how you can continually demonstrate to the consumer why it's coming to decisions they do and allow them to start trusting in the AI and understanding the judgments it makes. And it's hard to do when you're not necessarily talking to people that have got a PhD in computer science or whatever, but you don't need to. And I think the key there is by being able to sort of show rather than tell and show how its kinds of decisions are making rather than drawing up a mathematical algorithm.

Yeah, well, no, it's so interesting because you know, I am so happy that we are talking business leaders are talking about AI as much as they are. I actually think cyber circulation, cybersecurity did itself a Disservice for about 10 years because it was something that only the security team or IT teams or the information security teams talked about and everyone else said oh, they, we don't need to know about this. It's just that team over there is dealing with it. And it was kind of the cybersecurity was this really not well understood concept. And, and I'm a big believer in digital citizenship where people, employees, leaders within businesses need to continue to just understand technology and be a good digital citizen. And these concepts are not hard. You just need to understand the ABCs. As Poppy was saying, you don't need to have the PhD to understand exactly everything, but you need to be curious and open minded to just understand it. I love that as I hear business leaders and this idea that we're even thinking about bias in AI, I think that's great that we're talking about it now versus five years from now and just letting the technologists sort that out, that rises all everyone's understanding from a digital citizen standpoint. And what you want is leaders, the CEOs of these companies, the marketing leaders of these companies to be like, huh, I'm going to buy from this vendor. How do you do? Like have you thought about biasing your AI? And I think that it becomes all of the whole industry tides rise and again companies like poppies are building great value for businesses, which is great. And, and if you come across a company that has an AI product that does have bias, well, that actually creates an opportunity for an entrepreneur to go do it another way. And then you can vote with your wallet and your feet and say actually I care about this, so I'm going to adopt this service because of this, because they put the time and care in and I actually think the market will sort itself out the fact that we're even talking about it. So I think it's a very important point and it comes up a lot, but I'm actually very encouraged that we are talking about it at the business leader standpoint. And again, I think good digital citizenship at all leadership levels will be really important for the next five years.

Thank you.

Some really important comments there. And it does feel as if the conversation is evolving, it's becoming better informed. People feel leaders feel responsible even if they say they're not experts in the technology. And there's that greater wider awareness which I think is really important for digital citizenship. We all need to take that responsibility. So some encouraging thoughts there. Now I'm going to bring us right back to where we started. It's irresistible at this point in time to do some future gazing, even though most of us are feeling like we've been eating humble pie, as not many of us can honestly say hand on heart that we spotted Covid coming and impacting us in quite the way that it has. But I'm really interested to know what your reflections are, what your thoughts are on where the future of work is going and what this means for cyber security. So in particular, we have a fantastic group of founders and C suite execs. We have lots of organizational leaders in the Accelerate her community. And I'd really like you to kind of help us, as a non experts in the room, if you like, to get a better handle on what we should be thinking about, what we should be doing to make sure that we increase our resilience and our cyber safety and security. I'm going to go to Poppy first and then over to Michelle, if that's okay.

Yeah, and just as a sort of broader comment there as well. And whilst we're doing a little bit of stargazing, what I love about technology and innovation at its heart, and this might hopefully will ring true to some of your viewers, is that we're really bad at second guessing what innovation is around the corner. And it's times like this when innovation is really at its best and it's those businesses that are small and nimble and able to make quick decisions and respond fast that really come out at the sort of cutting edge of what we are, what we are capable of. And the example I often give is Blade Runner, which was set in 1982, sorry, created in 1982 and set in 2018 a couple of years ago, and it's all flying cars and robots and all this amazing, fantastical stuff that obviously hasn't happened. But when the main person goes to make a very futuristic video call, he parks his flying car, gets out, walks across the street and goes into a video call booth to do it from his video call booth. And today's reality that you have all this amazing technology there in your pocket is something that was well beyond even our wildest imaginations. So, as a technologist, I'm really excited at the thought of we're right around just behind the corner of what is going to be some amazing technology innovation. And I, for one, I'm really excited about seeing what that is. And I think it's going to be those really quick and nimble and agile companies that deliver it. But bringing that back to cybersecurity, I think one of the biggest things that we're going to be seeing is just the automation of the attacks. And Michelle talked about those bots that are just trawling through looking for any vulnerability. And they're not big, they're not particularly clever, but they're really, really fast. And if your security is reliant on human beings sitting in front of a screen monitoring it that run over and unplug a cable at the critical time, you're just not going to be able to keep up. The big Maersk breach, for example, is often talked about. The fact that that came through in like 14 minutes and that was throughout the entire organization. And unless cybersecurity takes that next step at not aimed at to be able to detect, but to be able to respond at the speed of these attacks, which, let's be honest, is at machine speed, I think, you know, they're not going to be able to keep up with the pace of the attack.

Great.

You know, we, we agree on so much Poppy, which, which is wonderful, makes this so pleasant and fun, I hope, and, and hopefully also good for the audience. I always sometimes worry. I absolutely agree. I think that there's a couple other things I would add. So, and this is from an entrepreneur standpoint, as you said, you have a lot of founders. You know, it's just digital first. I mean, we're just seeing, I think going forward having people are really going to think about their digital first experiences. I mean, a lot some companies did before, but today, again, because you can't physically go into places this digital first experience for businesses. And I think some companies are further along than others, but that feels like something that's going to last and have implications to that and opportunities. It'll both be a good and a bad thing. And people are rethinking a lot about digital first, both in the workforce. What does that mean for my employees? But just also how do we interact with our customers? Are we doing enough in that? And I actually think we'll see a lot of innovation from big companies, small companies around that, because digital first seems like it's not going away. It is here to stay and it's kind of like the bottle's been open. It'll go back a little bit, but it's not going to go back to how it was before. I think we've kind of passed a chasm. So that's very top of mind as something that I've seen and as a founder, that's an opportunity. And the other thing I will say is that there's been a lot of, a lot of media coverage around what does this mean for businesses and especially as a technology provider. And what we have seen is that companies are going through their kind of budget and they're kind of dividing their vendors into nice to haves, must haves and the companies that are in the must have bucket. And we can use Zoom as one. Their business is doing great because all of a sudden everyone wants to be making phone calls and there are other companies that are in the must have bucket too. And if you are a founder, you want to be building a service that's in the must have bucket, not the nice to have bucket. And if you are in the nice to have bucket, I think it's going to be a really rocky few quarters. And so you got to be thinking really strategically about how you're preserving cash and what does that mean for you. But if you can be fine, be like, oh well, these digital first experiences are mattering. I have a service that helps that it's a must have, not nice to have. I think those businesses are doing really well and are the ones that are going to come out a lot stronger and be the leaders over the next five years. They're going to gain share during this time. On the cybersecurity front, what Poppy said, the way that I would describe that is, I mean the hardware, historically cybersecurity was done through hardware. Covid has changed everything. It is all about cloud security at this point because of the ability to do machine learning and crowdsourcing of the data, the flexibility to build to scalability. Cloud security platforms are well positioned now. That's very self serving. That's one of the things Cloudflare offers and we see it with our customers. It's again, our 27 million Internet properties are protected from 50 billion cyber attacks daily. Right. Our technology just does that and it shares the information across all of that community. But I just see that as something that it is going to help patch the Internet in real time and make cybersecurity in some regards easier for these businesses and they'll have to go focus on other things which will be good. But I do think cloud is changing a lot in the way that these services are going to be adopted by businesses because it's just much more flexible than the hardware world from the last 10 years. And that's just that shift was always already happening. This is going to accelerate the shift. You're going to see the same thing with VPNs. Hardware VPNs are going to go away and they're all going to go into VPN services because cloud based VPN services because it's much more scalable.

Michelle Poppy, you've been absolutely brilliant. I know you're both incredibly busy people, so we are really grateful that you've taken time out of your hectic schedules to join us here for AccelerateHER Live. You've given us a huge range of insights from the sort of where's the industry going through to really practical things that founders and leaders need to be thinking about today. Thank you for all that. You are incredibly inspiring people. I'm sure the Accelerate her community does look to you as really inspirational leaders. So thanks again and thanks everybody for joining us. Bye. I'm going to hand you back to Laura now.

Thank you so much, Ayyatan for expertly leading such a fascinating discussion. And Poppy and Michelle, thank you for those brilliant insights. We really, really appreciate you all taking the time. Thank you.

Thank you also to everyone listening in.

Please do stick around for our next session with the amazing Julia Cheek of Everly well and Simone Tate of Poppy Seed on the Power of a pivot under COVID 19.