Gaurav Keerthi: Why Most Companies Can’t Afford Cybersecurity

If you extrapolate even from security into other domains, you take a look at something as simple as water sanitation.

In the 1800s, water sanitation was like cybersecurity.

The kings and queens would have boiled water to drink, and it would be filtered and cleaned, and they would be able to drink it.

And then the villagers, those who lived out in the meadows, would have to dig from a well, and sometimes they died from all sorts of weird diseases that live in well water.

And the whole philosophy was you are all responsible for your own wells.

Please don't drink dirty water.

And eventually that worked for a little while.

And then the kings and queens started getting sick, too, because their cooks lived in the villages and their tailors lived in the villages and the supply chain of running a castle lived in villages.

And so they realized that the only way to keep themselves safe is to build what we now called modern water, water sanitation.

So piping systems where everybody gets clean drinking water.

We're still in that 1800s era of cybersecurity where like the enterprises believe that they can protect themselves and all of the people who are doing their gardening and cooking need to figure out a way to keep themselves clean and not pollute their enterprise environment.

But it can't be done unless we build essentially what the utility system for the country.

So that's the space that I think needs to be built and it's a problem that needs to be solved.

The problem is, is that from a cybersecurity standpoint, the small businesses these days are the target of nation states and threat actors.

So meanwhile, you have this behemoth, you know, countries with unlimited budgets now targeting small businesses that can't protect themselves.

And now, and since they became a target, the question I think was brought up, Does the government, and we're not just talking about the U.S. or Singapore, we're talking about many governments.

Do they have their responsibility ethically to help the small businesses to defend themselves to protect the greater good? So your story, your analogy is perfect in this because it's not just the small businesses that are going to get hurt.

It's the surrounding organizations, the other businesses, the other people, because they become ultimately targets through lateral movements and stuff.

So perfect story to that.

Yeah.

And it's the same example.

So even if you take it out of water sanitation and you go to something like vaccination, In economics, we have this concept of a public good and a private good.

And public goods are basically things that governments should be providing.

There's a whole economic definition about non-rivalrous consumption, et cetera, et cetera.

But the whole idea is there are enough positive externalities, there's enough positive side effects from consuming this thing that it should be given to everybody.