Cybersecurity in 2023: What business leaders should know

Royal Hansen: We have to bake security and safety into all products from the very beginning.

Katie Couric: This is Future Ready by Think with Google. I’m Katie Couric. Google protects more people online than any company in the world. Royal Hansen, VP of engineering for privacy, safety, and security, is the man overseeing the teams and technology behind it all. Royal, great to see you. Thank you for talking with me.

Hansen: Thank you.

Couric: Can you set the stage for us? What kinds of day-to-day cyber risks are we talking about?

Hansen: Every part of our lives is digitizing. And for every convenience, whether it’s the way you pay for something, the way you communicate with your family, the way a country makes decisions about investments. Any one of those conveniences could also be abused.

Couric: Clearly, these security breaches can wreak havoc. So are people and businesses prepared for them?

Hansen: Any company or individual who’s lived through the last couple of decades has added so much technology to their lives and to their business that they’re inevitably vulnerable to something.

If you think of the ransomware attacks that we’ve all read about and heard about over the last several years, I think the answer is that there are a lot of people who are not prepared.

So unless we make it easier for small businesses and for families to manage their online lives, they will remain vulnerable.

Couric: Google has launched a proactive program to help train the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Tell me about that.

Hansen: We are well on our way to training over 100,000 people through our Google digital certification program. We are also putting 10 million people through a digital literacy program, because we think that the individuals, the citizens of a country are as important as anything with a company or the country.

Couric: I imagine we’re all in this together, right? Businesses, communities, families, governments. How can everyone work together to mitigate our collective risk?

Hansen: First, for the consumer, it has to be easy. Any complication for the life of an individual in the modern world is going to keep them from being safe.

Second, companies need to stay modern in their technology.

And third, countries need to share threat intelligence. Who’s attacking and why? And there’s a number of things they can do if they’re willing to share threat intelligence.

Couric: So it sounds like the onus is really on the company and not necessarily on the consumer to keep them safe.

Hansen: We have to bake security and safety into all products from the very beginning.

Couric: Royal Hanson, thank you so much.

Hansen: Thank you.

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