Welcome to our second issue of Fast Future's weekly IT Strategy Report!
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"There’s a military saying, 'Don’t walk into a room, you're not prepared to walk out of.' Know what you want to accomplish, but realize that even the best laid plans aren't always successful." — Dwayne Smith, Director, Global Cybersecurity Engineering, Cummins
IT STRATEGY REPORT
Connecting technology leaders in Fast Future Country
Today’s itinerary:
Cybersecurity analysts moving into data scientist roles
The energy industry gears up for digital transformation
Jumpstarting IT transformation after COVID
Are you ready for some HPC?
IT innovators our our radar
Tech wins in Fast Future Country
Test your nerd knowledge!
November 9, 2021
MEET A Fast Future TECH LEADER
Cybersecurity analysts moving into data scientist roles
Dwayne Smith, Director, Global Cybersecurity Engineering, Cummins
The enterprise view of cybersecurity and its teams has begun to evolve within the context of rapid global growth. We spoke with Dwayne Smith, Global Director of Security Engineering at Cummins about that evolution.
Dwayne Smith joined Cummins in May of 2016, as the Director, Global Cybersecurity Engineering. In this role, Smith established and directed the strategic definition, design, and implementation of the next generation cybersecurity technologies and infrastructure protecting Cummins global and regional networks, systems, and data. Columbus, Indiana-based Cummins is a global power leader that designs, manufactures, sells and services diesel and alternative fuel engines, as well as related components and technology.
A native of Kentucky, Smith possesses more than 20 years of experience supporting commercial, defense, and intelligence organizations.
What are the trends that you're seeing that are impacting Cummins and other companies like yours?
Smith: We're seeing three significant shifts. Of course, work from anywhere is a trend and we hear this regularly in our recruiting and retention.
We're also seeing the adoption of a multi-cloud environment, and teams like mine must monitor this. Not just for packet analysis, but also for system hardening and confirmation as well as data analysis. System hardening is a preferred approach to minimizing vulnerabilities in the cloud now.
The third shift is moving cyber analysts into roles more like data scientists. There’s a high demand for this type of talent for building algorithms. With AWS, Google Chronicle, and Azure, there’s no shortage of platforms. As a chief information security officer (CISO), you’ve got to make selections and switch quickly, and you’ve got to have a team that is pretty flexible and will keep your processes in place. There is a tempo in reacting and be efficiency.
"Cost is an important part of cyber tooling. You’ve got to take a look at risk and base selections on the data in your environment on a bi-weekly basis."
— Dwayne Smith, Cummins
Are certifications, like CISSP, important in team building?
Smith: I received my CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) back in 2005. It's one of the most rigid credentials because you have to understand the concepts. About 50% of my team members have gotten it. We sponsor them to get credentials. Because of shifts in our roles as cybersecurity professionals, we are looking for more cloud certifications and, thus, cloud security professionals. We take all the free trainings possible from our cloud vendors.
What’s the latest development internally to how you attack cybersecurity planning?
Smith: We have two different groups—one is more technically focused on cyber-engineering and they provide oversight and compliance for product or project teams to ensure compliance with all of our cyber standards. We also have a second group that's more focused on building our own cybersecurity-specific products. We're looking to leverage more back-end services to understand risk.
How do you evaluate cybersecurity tooling?
Smith: Cost is an important part of cyber tooling. You’ve got to take a look at risk and base selections on the data in your environment on a bi-weekly basis. We're always looking at our portfolio of tools and how they work together. In cybersecurity planning, you try not to overlap with something you already have.
We look at what we're trying to accomplish for what we need to right-size that. I would suggest that prioritizing capacity planning is important in the scope of what the team is doing next. As well as DevSecOps (development, security & operations).
With the buzz about zero trust, what can a CISO do?
Smith: We focus on identity. Trust, but verify. This can be great for a security team, but it can also be disruptive. There’s a cost associated with it. Every company has to look at not just user identity, but device identity and application identity. It’s a journey that never ends.
At Cummins, what is your biggest tech challenge?
Smith: The rate of change in today’s companies is the biggest challenge. The pressures in business are to act globally, including looking at competition with China and others internationally. How great is a company’s appetite for risk in order to achieve something else? In technology choices at the corporate level, it can be security versus getting another new feature to market first. Is the rate of speed sustainable when you need to maintain security? Incremental wins need to be discerning and cyber professionals need to be generalists in other spaces of tech.
I encourage my team to seek out business podcasts to understand today’s executive critical thinking. There’s a military saying, 'Don’t walk into a room, you're not prepared to walk out of.' Know what you want to accomplish, but realize that even the best laid plans aren't always successful.
Dave is the digital bouncer, the guardian inside the door who’s watching, listening, and paying attention to their surroundings; making sure nobody’s trying to sneak in, that everyone’s accounted for and that nothing untoward goes unnoticed. Dave is the eyes and ears of the support team, making sure that everyone’s informed as to what’s going on, so others can focus on their jobs in as safe and secure a manner possible.
Dave is eloquent enough to be able to brief the leadership team yet detailed enough to keep the technical folks on their toes. However, Dave is designed to alert the local team or designated geek only when necessary as Dave handles all the general clutter, initial support, and analysis. And just as any good companion does… Dave alerts when you need to pay attention. Dave has also gotten the briefings on how to measure, how to address the to-do list and what you need to deal with next.
Don't miss must-read news about tech trends that will affect your IT strategy. Our Tech Trend Radar section covers topics such as cybersecurity, data management, talent development, and more.
The energy industry gears up for digital transformation
Aging power grids with large, centralized fossil fuel power stations are increasingly subject to concerns about environmental damage, reliability, integration of renewable energy resources, and other issues. Because of this, we’re now moving into a digital transformation of the energy industry. The new $20 million AES Corp. smart operations center in Dayton—the first of its kind in the U.S.—will act as the nerve center for an increasingly digitized electric distribution grid.
There is no question that COVID-19 upended our lives in the last year and a half. The pandemic sped up some aspects of health IT. For example, facilities invested in healthcare tech solutions that managed risk and regulations or streamlined the clinical value chain. But COVID also slowed things in other way, with projects having to be put on hold. In this article, Angela Yochem, executive vice-president and chief transformation and digital officer at Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, talks about digital transformation in a world changed by COVID and suggests ways to jumpstart new projects.
Are you ready for some HPC?
As technologies like IoT, AI, and 3-D imaging evolve, the size and amount of data that organizations have to work with is growing exponentially. High-performance computing (HPC) is being increasingly used to process that data, whether it’s to detect credit card fraud, track real-time stock trends, provide more accurate patient diagnoses, and so on. The high performance computing market is expected to witness a CAGR of 9. 44% over the forecast period from 2021 – 2026.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville has created a new Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence to provide solutions in HPC and visualization using oneAPI. The two projects the center will focus on are: porting the open-source HPC Ginkgo library to oneAPI for cross-architecture support, and expanding its Intel Graphics and Visualization Institute of XeLLENCE to enable high-end visualization as a service through oneAPI.
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ON OUR RADAR
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Tracking over 1K innovative companies. Are you one of them?
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TECH WINS IN Fast Future COUNTRY
IT is the backbone of all innovation. In this weekly feature, we share a variety of announcements covering IT-driven business advancement between the coasts.
Fast Future COUNTRY—A study from Suddenlink reveals the top 10 most tech-ready cities, based on the number of tech companies present, tech jobs per 10,000 capita, number of Wi-Fi hotspots, average internet speed, and the cost of monthly internet. While New York City scored the top spot the rest of the list was populated by cities in Fast Future country.
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN—Purdue University was the only university selected for Fast Company’s list of ‘Brands that Matter.’ Purdue joins a list of 95 internationally recognized brands, including Nike, Zoom and Yeti, and other large multinational conglomerates, small-but-mighty companies and nonprofits. Included in the reasons cited by Fast Company included The Data Mine, which prepares students for the data-driven workplace.
PITTSBURGH, PA—Pittsburgh-based startup Aurora Innovation unveiled the beta version of Aurora Driver, its flagship product that combines data captured from cameras, lidar, and other sensors into a perception system that can autonomously control and drive vehicles.
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TEST YOUR NERD KNOWLEDGE!
It's time to test your nerd knowledge!
Not all business leaders in innovative companies come with a tech background. Here's a fun way to learn new tech facts or brush up on your geek knowledge in this weekly feature.
What is the name of the supercomputer that recently defended its title as the world’s fastest supercomputer?
Who is the Victorian mathematician widely regarded as the “First Computer Programmer?”
What did IBM engineer Alan Shugart invent in 1971?
