What I learned from Adam Ely, vice president and deputy CISO for Walmart.
Adam Ely, vice president & deputy CISO, Walmart
It’s 86 degrees, sunny, here at the Hilton in Pensacola Beach, FL. Attending the premiere conference for innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and network (ITEN Wired) in the region has always been a great experience. It’s a diverse conference of everything that deals with the ecosystem surrounding technology and innovation. Typing this post in between sessions—pardon any typos!
Kicking off this year’s conference was a keynote from Adam Ely. Adam, who’s currently the DCISO of Walmart, is here to talk about the “Future of Cybersecurity.” To be clear, Adam’s talk is of his personal views, not of the company he works for.
Here are my key takeaways from his talk:
Diversity
Calibrating the expectations to get funding
Privacy in today’s hyperconnected society
Diversity
His insights on diversity is something that I believe in and is something I feel has helped me get a wide perspective of the business I’m in and the consumer behavior. According to Adam, the best way to be ahead of any cyberattack or in any business, is to be around diverse disciplines and industries. Simply put, he learns faster when around “unlike” minds.
Hanging out with similar minds as yourself doesn’t stretch or challenge your points-of-view. Sticking within your community serves like an impediment in learning because of confirmation bias and narrow scope of thinking. Getting the perspective of different angles of the industry and of different industries helps you understand the relationship between ecosystems and the consumers they serve.
Adam has shared how he interacts with outsiders, technologists, business operations, customers, and even regulators and politicians. These activities allows him to be a generalist in the business he’s heading up. It removes the blinders that many subject-matter experts have that hinders quicker realization of what the next threat or opportunity is.
Personally, I’ve had the opportunity to work in 13 different roles within my organization in the past 20 years. Working at almost all facets the organization allows me to get a better perspective on how things work and how things relate to each other. I find that this helps me create value to the company by implementing my knowledge, my practice, and how they integrate with the overall organization.
Calibration of SLA
A question was asked to Adam during the Q&A portion of his keynote. It was around, how to get funding from the executives to modernize technology and to optimize aging hardware. Adam’s response was simple, and if you’ve been in this sort of business for a while, pretty clear-cut, yet it’s actionable and highly effective.
Redundancy of systems provides organizations a safety net. Key in having redundancy is to ensure that the separate systems are not at the same stage of its lifecycle. Meaning, one is newer/older than the other. That way they won’t fail at the same time. Then, this redundancy needs to be set as a “standard” in your organization. That way, when one of the work streams has started to deteriorate, you can go back to your executives to pull the organization back to the state of redundancy. Calibrating your SLA and the organizational strategy around the redundancy to ensure that the organization is fully equipped to cope with any vulnerability.
Privacy
Adam shared the story on when he tried to call an UBER ride several years ago at around midnight. Back then, UBER’s operations ended at 10:30pm. Adam suddenly received an email from UBER’s CEO apologizing for not having the service for him at that time. Advising him that they’re gearing towards expanding to 24/7 in a few months.
Scary or Cool? Certainly, both. Scary because the person on top of this organization is able to know when and where you are trying to use their service. The concept of UBER alone, many years ago, would be a greatly scary paradigm. Having a stranger pick you up, drive you to wherever, then have access to your exact location and your payment services. Cool because of the possibilities of create value back to the consumers. Knowing the consumers more allows the company to create services and products that is as agile as the constantly changing consumer behavior.
Hope you enjoyed this quick post on Adam Ely’s keynote speech. More to come!