As organizations face increasing threats from cybercriminals, the need for cybersecurity strategies becomes even more critical, thus prompting the Naveen Jindal School of Management to create more academic programs that can equip its students to solve these types of problems.
The inaugural Cybersecurity Day, presented Oct. 17 by the Jindal School, is a key component of these efforts. Organizers brought chief information security officers from various industries and governmental agencies to discuss their responses to growing threats such as the cyberattack on Change Healthcare (a topic that was recently discussed on The Business of Healthcare Podcast). The event also highlighted the career opportunities created by cybersecurity strategies.
Dr. Dawn Owens, a clinical associate professor in the Information Systems Area and associate dean of undergraduate studies at the Jindal School; Dr. Gaurav Shekhar, an assistant professor of instruction in the Jindal School’s Information Systems Area and senior assistant dean for graduate programs, graduate student experience; and Nalneesh Gaur, cybersecurity partner at PwC; were event co-chairs.
Owens said the event represents the Jindal School’s commitment to fostering a community of innovation, collaboration, and education in the rapidly evolving field of cybersecurity.
“We were excited to bring together industry leaders, faculty, and students to engage in meaningful dialogue and strengthen our understanding of emerging challenges and solutions in this critical area,” she said. “This is particularly important as we look ahead to the future and how we continue to grow and evolve to support industry needs and talent.”
Ron Mehring, CISO at Texas Health Resources, was the keynote speaker.
Mehring explained that cybersecurity cannot be siloed in a company but rather requires collaboration across functional areas.
“I have a unique role in Texas Health,” he said. “I’m not only the chief information security officer, but I also lead their technology operations… I have a blended role. It’s like combining the CISO and chief technology officer function into one place. And that has to do with the philosophy the chief information officer and I have about how to make cybersecurity work in an enterprise… It requires a lot of people and to get together to solve very difficult problems. Cybersecurity teams cannot do that on their own. It is a team effort.”
A CISO and his or her team need to have improvisational skills, the ability to keep multiple plates in the air at the same time, Mehring explained.
“We are a heavily regulated industry and healthcare and so you got to maintain your compliance structure at the same time you’re defending from bad actors,’ he said.
Success also requires a lifelong learning mindset, he said.
“Most successful cybersecurity practitioners have a continuous learning mindset” he explained “Every morning for two hours I’m reading… it’s not cybersecurity related but definitely can be related to the practice in some form or fashion. Definitely gives me a new mental model, but I do that often… that’s been part of my discipline. I’m learning something new on a weekly basis.”
The event’s panel discussion zeroed in on an ever-changing cybersecurity landscape and highlighted challenges such as a shortage of talent, internal threats (including AI) and the need to increase cross-industry collaboration to solve those problems. It was moderated by Dr. Dawn Owens, a clinical associate professor in the Information Systems Area and associate dean of undergraduate studies at the Jindal School, featured Jeff Kirby, CISO at Interstate Batteries; Peeyush Patel, CIO and Global CISO at XPO Logistics; Bryce Carter, CISO at the City of Arlington; and Nate Howe, CISO at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Kirby explained that cybersecurity talent is difficult to find and that companies will be more successful if they look to the right higher-ed institutions to feed that talent pipeline.
“Historically cyber hasn’t been a defined program in universities,” he said. “A lot of us learn from experience, from having good mentors, from sort of accidentally falling into cyber, so being able to find the right talent for cyber has always been a challenge… I think by some estimates close to 30% of the cyber positions are still open because folks can’t find the right talent.”
AI, Kirby explained, is a big problem for maintaining cybersecurity.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” he said. “In our business units, my good friends in the creative areas like marketing and design… they’re not one to use our standard tools… I think we’ve got to really investigate those tools, try to standardize the environments.”
Carter said that as the sophistication AI increases, it will be increasingly more challenge to fight it — even with AI.
“It’s getting so sophisticated that I mean, at some point it’s going to be hard to trust a lot of the things we find online,” he said. “As AI emerges, the technology gets better and better and better… We might not be able to have technology that can fight the technology because it’s going to be so realistic and by comparison to the real thing… So I think some of that is going to be… the going back to the basics, like maybe go meet that person in person.”
Howe, when asked about preparation for cybersecurity said that students at UTD often ask him if they need to be a programmer to work in the field.
“My feeling on that is it helps,” he said. “But absolutely there’s a place for you if you want to help fight cybercrime. There’s a place for you even if you’re not a, a proficient programmer. And so that is something that number one, we can find that talent, we can find people who do have programming, but there’s so many jobs around security, whether it be relationship management, training, tech, technical writing… project management, a lot of the security we do is actually running tools where you don’t need to be the programmer who wrote it. You can just use the tool. And if you experienced that, you can still create value for people.”
Shekhar noted that the event comes at a crucial time, as the world — and especially industry — continues to move deeper into the digital realm, which demands increasingly stronger protections to ensure security.
“As an academic institution, our responsibility is to not only equip our students — the future workforce — with the right skills, but also to engage with industry thought leaders in advancing best practices for securing digital domains,” he said. “The inaugural Cybersecurity Day served as a vital confluence of these partnerships — academia, industry and students — to discuss the current landscape and emerging challenges. It also signals our commitment to supporting industry by building a robust pipeline of skilled talent.”
