Tag Archive for: journey

A non-conventional career journey into IT security

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Demand for people with technology skills is increasing, but the talent pool is not growing fast enough, according to Harvey Nash, with 70% of organisations struggling to keep up with the pace of change due to a skills shortage.

For years, successive governments have tried to focus schooling around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but these policies have not had a major impact on addressing the dire shortage of IT people, who are essential if organisations want to develop thriving digital businesses.

There are numerous ways people can enter a career in IT. While graduate intake is key for some organisations, Harvey Nash believes IT leaders should also consider less traditional mechanisms, such as apprenticeships. Programmes specifically geared to attracting more diverse talent are gaining huge traction.

A different approach

Cyber security specialist Junade Ali is someone whose career came about throught a non-traditional approach.

In June 2023, Ali was elected as a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). At the age of 27, he is believed to be the youngest person ever to gain this prestigious IET membership level. Although he left school with no formal qualifications, Ali recently completed a PhD.

His many contributions to IT security include developing cyber security techniques that have been adopted in products built by Apple and Google, and developing software to help de-escalate cyber warfare situations. Computer Weekly has previously spoken to Ali about his research into burnout among software engineers.

Discussing his schooling and early career, Ali describes it as “a non-conventional journey”. While many would assume a STEM background, Ali dropped out of school for personal reasons and eventually began working in software development and worked his way up to running a web development department at a large digital agency. He then started developing software for high-reliability systems.

By the time he was 17, Ali managed to get onto a master’s programme while working for a major US cyber security firm. He graduated with a distinction grade. When he then decided to study for a doctorate, he found himself in the…

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SASE Reality Check: Security and SD-WAN Integration Journey

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By: Nav Chander, Head of Service Provider SD-WAN/SASE Product Marketing at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Today, enterprise IT leaders are facing the reality that a hybrid work environment is the new normal as we transition from a post-pandemic world. This has meant updating cloud, networking, and security infrastructure to adapt to the new realities of hybrid work and a world where employees will need to connect to and access business applications from anywhere and from any device, in a secure manner. In fact, most applications are now cloud-hosted, presenting additional IT challenges to ensure a high-quality end-user experience for the remote worker, home office worker, or branch office.

Network security policies that are based on the legacy data-center environment where applications are backhauled to the data center affect application performance and user experience negatively within a cloud-first environment. These policies also don’t function end-to-end in an environment where there are BYOD or IoT devices. When networking and network security requirements are managed by separate IT teams independently and in parallel, do you achieve the best architecture for digital transformation?

So, does implementing a SASE architecture based on a single vendor solve all of these challenges?

SASE, in itself, is not its own technology or service: the term describes a suite of services that combine advanced SD-WAN with Security Service Edge (SSE) to connect and protect the company from web-based attacks and unauthorized access to the network and applications. By integrating SD-WAN and cloud security into a common framework, SASE implementations can both improve network performance and reduce security risks. But, because SASE is a collection of capabilities, organizations need to have a good understanding of which components they require to best fit their needs.

A key component of a SASE framework is SD-WAN. Because of SD-WAN’s rapid adoption to support direct internet access, organizations can leverage existing products to serve as a foundation for their SASE implementations. This would be true for both do-it-yourself as well as managed services…

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A City’s Journey to Smart Solutions: A Bottoms-Up Approach to Balancing Privacy, Security and Public Safety

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This article is the fifth in a series that follows the City of Oakland’s journey to balance privacy and security in the aftermath of a public safety crisis – from the formation of the first citizen-led privacy commission in the nation that was created in response to planned expansion of surveillance throughout the city, to a bottoms-up, citizen-led initiative from one district to deploy smart surveillance technology throughout all districts of the city. Read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here, and the fourth installment here.

As the article preceding this Oakland series quoted The Dark Knight, this article will wrap up the series with another: “The night is darkest before the dawn…I promise you, the dawn is coming.” These words vowed by the character Harvey Dent/Two-Face were meant to assure citizens of the crime-ridden city of Gotham. But when will the dawn come for Oakland, a city in the midst of a long-lasting public-safety crisis?

The drones that took flight in Oakland in March 2022 came from a community left reeling in the aftermath of a dual pandemic of COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate, amid a tsunami of violent crimes that tore through all districts of the city. While crimes rose throughout the nation during the pandemic, Oakland scores No. 1 as the most dangerous on a crime index with a scale of 1 to 100. Oakland residents have a 1 in 77 chance of being a victim of violent crime – a rate that is almost three times higher compared to the state of California with a rate of 1 in 227.[1]

It was citizens from Oakland Chinatown who made the surveillance technology possible. A private donation of $80K enabled the launch of the drone program with the Oakland Police Department (OPD), after the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) was finally approved by the Privacy Advisory Commission (PAC) and City Council, although the source of the donated funds for the drones is under an open and ongoing investigation with the City of Oakland. It was the latest effort by the residents of Oakland Chinatown in response to the rise in violent crimes and targeted hate-crime attacks against Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI)….

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Aarogya Setu’s journey from a quick fix for contact tracing to ‘health app of the nation’

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Aarogya Setu started off as a contact tracing app for the country but is now integrated with Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), ABHA and with additional functionalities like sharing health status through QR code, Open API, health advisories, and testing lab details, “ it has transitioned into the health app for the nation,” National Informatics Centre (NIC) Director Seema Khanna told indianexpress.com. Incidentally, the app no longer enables contact tracing via Bluetooth, a feature the Aarogya Setu team says can be “re-introduced… depending upon the health department requirements.”

During the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak in India, after getting crucial inputs from epidemiologists and experts, it was understood that contact tracing was going to be the key factor in controlling the spread of the disease. Even developed countries were struggling in carrying out contact tracing, and implementing contact tracing for a nation like India with over a billion people was going to be even tougher.

MEITY-NIC had only a few weeks to architect a solution from scratch, develop the solution, test it and roll it out to millions of users. “As a response to the national crisis, a few enterprising and brilliant volunteers came together from industry and academia and facilitated the release of the initial framework and prototype in a matter of weeks. With the help of senior experts from government, private sector and academia, the prototype was further augmented and turned into a full-fledged app,” one of the team members said.

As many as 102 members including people from the government, industry and academia leadership were all part of the project. The app is currently being offered under the umbrella of MOHFW, NHA with NIC under Meity as the IT partner. Indeed, the app required funding to operate and continues to do so.

Prior to Aarogya Setu, contact tracing was being carried out manually, mostly through human contact tracers. The team was able to leverage the mobile app to carry out contact tracing on a mass scale. In the absence of Aarogya Setu, the nation would have needed lakhs of human contact tracers, who would need to go door-to-door in every nook and corner of the…

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