Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Think like a CIO: Cyber resiliency starts and ends with your data (HYB101)

Summary

The session began with a fireside chat with Ryan, who shared his extensive IT background, starting from biochemistry to various roles in IT, including at Novartis, Microsoft, Charles Schwab, and finally as CIO at KBI, a subsidiary of JSR Corporation.
JSR Corporation is a Japanese conglomerate known for its chemical innovations, with three main divisions: digital solutions, plastics, and life sciences.
Ryan discussed the cybersecurity challenges and strategies at JSR, emphasizing the importance of data protection and modernization across the enterprise.
Cohesity, a data management solution, was implemented at JSR to address concerns about ransomware and data protection, particularly for scientific instrument data that could only be written to local drives.
JSR also uses AWS for infrastructure as a service, hosting SAP, and leveraging AWS services for application development and data aggregation.
The session covered enterprise challenges, including data types, backup and recovery speeds, regulatory compliance, and the importance of having a recovery plan.
Best practices discussed included zero trust maturity model, NIST framework alignment, fault tolerance, immutability, encryption, and security hardening.
The session concluded with a call to understand your data, comply with regulations, integrate data management into security strategy, and test everything for disaster recovery.

Ryan's transition from biochemistry to IT highlights the interdisciplinary nature of IT roles and the importance of diverse backgrounds in the tech industry.
JSR Corporation's diverse business units and global presence underscore the complexity of managing data and cybersecurity in a conglomerate.
The use of Cohesity at JSR illustrates the need for flexible and robust data management solutions that can handle complex and varied data types, including scientific data with unique storage requirements.
JSR's use of AWS services reflects the trend of enterprises leveraging cloud infrastructure for scalability and agility, while also highlighting the need for hybrid solutions that combine on-premises and cloud resources.
The discussion on enterprise challenges and best practices provides valuable insights into the current landscape of data management and cybersecurity, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive approach that includes zero trust, data immutability, and regular recovery testing.
The session's focus on understanding data, compliance, security integration, and testing aligns with broader industry trends towards data-centric security strategies and proactive disaster recovery planning.