Welcome to Speed Data: Quick Conversations With Cybersecurity Leaders. Like speed dating, our goal is to capture the hearts of CISOs with intriguing, unique insight in a rapid format for security professionals pressed for time.
This week, Ralph Severini takes a seat on Speed Data. The Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance at Amazon Web Services discusses how generative AI will shape the future, shares his passion for jazz, and recounts how his group of former colleagues helped thwart the first-ever cybercriminal.
The crossroads of cybersecurity and insurance technology
Succeeding in cybersecurity takes more than just book smarts, said Ralph Severini, the Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance at AWS. It also requires an inquisitive nature.
You’ve got to have technical skills, but detective skills and plain old curiosity are also essential to the job because you’re always kind of hunting and pecking.
Ralph Severini, AWS Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance
Ralph got his start in cybersecurity and insurance technology while working alongside Nobel Prize winners at Bell Labs, founded by the famous Alexander Graham Bell.
“I worked in a group that thwarted the first cybercriminal, Robert Morris,” Ralph said. “He was a graduate student at Cornell who worked at Bell Labs one summer. After he left the labs, he created the first internet worm.”
Ralph later segued his love for cybersecurity into insurance technology, following in his father's footsteps.
“I blame this all on my dad,” Ralph joked. “There’s a lot of people who blame someone in their family when they joined insurance, but I kind of forged the two interests at a time.”
Generative AI: revolutionary or risky?
Ralph said that, like many organizations, Amazon relies on gen AI to optimize its supply chain, create better search results for customers, and deliver services like everyone’s favorite digital assistant, Alexa.
Gen AI is the next step in artificial intelligence, and it’s arguably going to reinvent every application we interact with.
Ralph Severini, AWS Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance
However, generative AI can also amplify risk by potentially aiding attackers.
“This is the scary thing, that there’s plenty of bad actors out there, and they can easily incorporate gen AI to build malicious code,” he said. “It’s not a possibility — it’s a reality.”
Setting the bar for cloud service providers
Fortunately, Ralph said, AWS doesn’t skimp when it comes to security.
“We have over 300 security compliance and governance services, 143 supported security standards including HIPAA, FEDRamp, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-53, and we’ve been in business 18 years delivering cloud services to millions of customers worldwide,” he said.
“We believe we have the most operational scale and experience of any cloud provider,” he said.
It’s a bold claim but one the powerhouse CSP can back up. AWS has the largest market share of any cloud service provider and recently won the gold medal for execution on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services.
As Ralph said, “There’s no compression algorithm for experience.”
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