An Antwerp Management School (AMS) Research Journey into Digital Platform Security Assurance

Over the last 30 years Antwerp Management School (AMS) is a leader in Information Risk, Security and Compliance education and research. Founded by prof. dr. Wim van Grembergen and prof. dr. Steven de Haes, AMS in these years heavily contributed to the ISACA community with research, books and publications. To celebrate our 30th anniversary of the Executive IT Master programs AMS presents it’s latest research project in Digital Platform Security Assurance.

Speakers: Yuri Bobbert – Yves Vanderbeken – Dennis Verslegers

Prof. dr. Yuri Bobbert, academic director at AMS, will kick off this Square Table and will introduce two (of the four) researchers (mr. Vanderbeken and mr. Verslegers) who conducted research and published their work in their new book ‘Strategic Approaches to Digital Platform Security Assurance‘ (the book is co-authored by dr. Maria Chtepen (BNP Paribas Group) and Tapan Kumar (Cognizant, The Netherlands).

In this presentation we cover 2 chapters of this book that highlight 2 topics.

• What is a digital platform and what are successful strategies for implementation?
• How do we build and run secure software technology to enable these platforms?

Yves Vanderbeken is DXC Technology’s chief technologist. With over 25 years of experience in IT, Yves combines extensive cross industry expertise from government, finance, and manufacturing.  As a Business oriented Technologist, Yves foremost likes to work with clients and see the results of joined design or strategy work become reality.

Topic:
Digital business platforms are all around us. Some succeed and attract huge crowds. Some fail miserably. Even governments start applying this model to provide proactive and self-service citizen services. Based on research and case studies, this session will introduce how to design, build and roll out a successfull platform model that has value for all stakeholders, embraces an ecosystem of suppliers, but, most of all, is based on a well defined vision and strategy. Find out how to measure your platform model and what the recommendations are for the next step in your maturity.

Dennis Verslegers is a seasoned IT Security Expert with over 20 years of experience in a wide variety of roles. His passion revolves around bringing Business and IT together on the topic of Cyber Security Risks by helping them to step up and get security right. Dennis has acquired a wide perspective on the challenges related to building things and building them securely. His interests range from governance to code and anything in between. He couldn’t be happier living in an age where we can think of things such as infrastructure-as-code, security-as-code and even policy-as-code. Dennis currently performs research on DevSecOps and helps organisations on their path towards rapid, reliable and secure software engineering.

Topic:
Digital platforms play a key role in meeting market demands and undergo a continuous evolution. The speed with which these platforms evolve is detrimental for the competitive advantage of any organisation. To satisfy the demand for speed and agility new ways of organising digital competences are explored and gaining in popularity rapidly.

At the same time an increasing pressure from regulators and decreasing tolerance for security breaches by customers is reducing the risk appetite of key stakeholders and investors. The challenge which presents itself is increasing the security posture of our digital platforms without sacrificing speed and agility. Common perception dictates that rapid change increases security risk. This however does not necessarily hold true as security itself benefits from the ability to implement changes quickly. It allows a system adapt to discover vulnerabilities and t0 react to a continuously evolving threat landscape. What is considered secure today may not necessarily hold true tomorrow. The only way to safeguard business value is through rapid change.

So, let’s face the challenge on how to integrate security in these new ways of working and leverage it as an enabler for creating secure business value. This is what this Square Table is all about: integrating security without causing friction and enable speed and quality of digital businesses.