Proofpoint Hosts Seminar on Cybersecurity

A panel of security experts convened by Proofpoint this week addressed a variety of issues related to COVID-19 and its impact on the global supply chain workforce.

“National Cybersecurity Alliance and Proofpoint Roundtable: Women in Cybersecurity Leading Through Unprecedented Change,” featured Sue Lapierre, Prologis’ head of IT Governance including Information Security, IT Vendor Management, and Agile Project Management.

According to Lapierre, San Francisco-based Prologis began addressing the pandemic crisis as soon as it was discovered in Wuhan.

“Given our global warehousing network in the Asia/Pacific region, we saw how quickly we needed to react after the Chinese New Year celebrations got underway,” she says. “Our journey to becoming cloud-based began six years ago, and now we are 100 percent reliant on it.”

Furthermore, she says, most of their clients were already comfortable with the new technology.

“Still, we put together a sub-committee as a COVID-19 task force, to monitor all the systems worldwide. It has been fairly fluid since then.”

Deborah Blyth, Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Colorado, recalls a few more hurdles in her operation for the government.

“When we sent people home from an office environment, we had to quickly scale up our IT functions to establish VPN accounts,” she says. “There was a significant learning curve for everyone establishing web conferencing tools and building new accounts.”

Mary Haynes, vice president of Network Security Charter Communications, says that her firm’s experience in “disaster recovery” helped provide security as it was refined over time.

“Just ensuring that everyone has internet service at home was an initial challenge,” she recalls. “But we are now comfortable with our security safeguards and protocols.”

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