Cyber Management Alliance, the global frontrunner in Cybersecurity Consultancy and Training, was recently invited to participate in one of the most significant European events for the cybersecurity industry. Organised by the Information Security Society Switzerland and Security Interest Group Switzerland (SIGS), the ‘Comeback’ Barbecue event was the first SIGS event after the pandemic.
Bal Rai and Amar Singh, the co-founders of Cyber Management Alliance, flew down to Zurich for the event. Amar Singh, the CEO of Cyber Management Alliance, who is also one of the top practising CISOs globally, was invited to host a roundtable event on Incident Response and Management. The roundtable discussion hosted by Amar was titled - 'How Prepared Are We to Actually Handle An Incident?' Amar conducted two sessions on the subject of Incident Response.
Amar and CM-Alliance are the creators of the Cyber Incident Planning & Response Course, certified by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. Amar has been at the forefront of delivering training and thought leadership on Incident Response across the world. His views on the subject coupled with his extensive experience as an engaging trainer and event facilitator made his roundtable session particularly interesting and insightful for the attending participants.
The 150 attendees of the event included Group CISOs, Heads of Security, CIOs, CTOs etc. from top global organisations such as Credit Suisse AG, UBS AG, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Goldman Sachs, Novartis AG, Protiviti Switzerland, Swisscom and Zürcher Kantonalbank amongst many others.
About his session and the subject, Amar Singh said, “In handling a large number of incidents on a yearly basis, I come across a wide variety of organisations and an equally large variety in their levels of preparedness to respond to cyber incidents. When thinking about “being prepared for an incident”, there are two large tracks to look into: technically and procedurally. From a technical perspective, we want to have certain things in place such as the right monitoring tools, tools with responsive capabilities, backups etc. Likewise, from a procedural perspective, there are also a number of things we’d like to see such as an Incident Response Plan, an Incident Response Playbook and engaging in Cyber Crisis Tabletop Exercises.”
Amar said that the goal of his roundtable discussion was to shed light on and discuss everything that can be done to be better prepared. Through shared experiences on measures that participating organisations have taken or those they wish they should have, the outcome of the discussions was geared to leave everyone with fresh ideas, strategies and insights they could implement upon going back to work.
This event and the roundtable discussion was a part of several such initiatives that Cyber Management Alliance regularly contributes to. Imparting education on and building awareness about Cyber Incident Planning and Response is a major part of the organisation’s mission.
As a part of this mission, CM-Alliance hasn’t only created the NCSC-Certified Training, it has also created several free resources such as an Incident Response Checklist and a free Cyber Incident Response Plan Template that businesses can download for free and kickstart their journey towards improved cyber resilience and response capabilities.