Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:06):
So we're at a Adastral Park is BT's r and D headquarters, and we're here for the Operators Secure Tomorrow Festival. I'm talking with Howard Watson here, of course is BT's, chief security and networks officer. So Howard, thanks very much for joining us here today. Incredible event. There's like a thousand people here or something. It's brilliant, Ray, and thank you for coming here today along with you and your colleagues. Great to see you again. Oh great. Listen, as part of the event today, BT announced some latest stats on what it's seeing on its networks and also the networks of its enterprise customers. An incredible start, like 200 million signals of cyber attacks per day, more than 200 million. I mean, that's just an incredible number, but I mean is it really that incredible? Is this what BT's been dealing with for years? We've been trying to find what's

Howard Watson, BT (00:57):
A great way of representing that trend as the security environment gets ever more difficult to continually defend for ourselves and for our customers. And so we have this great insight, we have all the networks and we can see hostile events as they traverse that network. So that's essentially what we are measuring there.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:21):
Okay. So I mean bt, I think it's fair to say that BT has been at the forefront regarded as one of the network security leaders for quite a few years now. Can you just talk to us about the evolution of BT's network security strategy? I mean, how has that changed in the past 10 years?

Howard Watson, BT (01:44):
I think it has certainly evolved over that period. And don't forget, it's for networks but's also for how we secure our IT and how we secure the enterprises of our customers. And each of those are secured, changed in a slightly different way. So for example, over that 10 year period, we've been from very much workloads being on premise in our data centers, in customers data centers. We then went through a period where customers look for other companies, including BT, to host their workloads in our data centers. Then we've been through the era of it all being pushed into cloud. I would suggest it's starting to come back a little bit. Nations are wanting sovereignty, Europe's wanting sovereignty of its data. So I think we're starting to see a little bit of a trend of a bit fewer workloads going into the cloud. So however, we have developed solutions for all those on-premise security across network security, but also cloud security and importantly being able to secure your individual application.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:54):
So I mean, as I mentioned, BT has been providing these kind of services to enterprises for years and also using AI and very sophisticated tools to track cyber threats for years. And a couple of years ago you put this all together and gave it a name Eagle Eye for that service. Can you tell us how that has evolved? Has that proved very popular in the enterprise domain? Is this something that is helping a lot of companies to defend their businesses? I mean, my

Howard Watson, BT (03:24):
Go-to-market colleagues can talk to you about the success that they're having with their customers on Eagle Eye. From my perspective, this is a platform that we use to pull together some of the best solutions for a company's security needs. It also means that when I'm doing research here, industrial park and when that research is on both AI but also on security. And if I think of the research these days, it's telecoms focused, AI focused, security focused, and quantum as well. Now increasingly, we now have a platform to sort of navigate how we focus that research. And again, EagleEye is very much built on the insight that we get into our networks. So the 2000 events a second that we talked about earlier, that richness of data is fed into that platform, we can then create insight from that which we can share with our customers and that's what the platform

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:22):
Enables for our customers. So I mean BT has been working using AI machine learning and now is using quantum secure networking technologies. All of these new technologies evolving and you're bringing them into the security domain. So what does that mean for the role of the chief Information security officer at bt? How is that role evolving? Because something you've taken on now, isn't it?

Howard Watson, BT (04:49):
Yes, it is. Well, I mean the great thing is that we had the foresight to combine the chief security officer role with the chief networks officer role. So in my role looking at security and networks, we also said security first in my job title. And that was really to create a message to the organization because how networks and security have, if we really think about it being quite different disciplines, mainly across the industry, we saw that coming together probably four to five years ago and are focused really hard on driving that together. It's really interesting to see now what some of our vendor partners in the industry are doing and how they're driving a crossover between their security and networks. Just look at some of the latest changes at Cisco because that's pushed their security and networking organizations together. So I think we had some early foresight into doing that a lot more to do a lot of capability. However, things like 5G, we spent a lot of time talking about one of 5G from a security point of view, which was a particular vendor really that's not given us enough time to talk about the inherent improved security that is in the 5G network, particularly about how you authenticate across that network. So bringing that to life for our customers

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:15):
Is a critical part of my role. And also as these technologies develop and evolve so quickly, to what extent are you having to work with third party partners and to what extent are you able to develop particular services or applications in-House to be able to meet the needs of your customers?

Howard Watson, BT (06:38):
It's quite interesting if you compare the two disciplines of networks and security. So in networks we have the problem that we want more diversification, particularly in mobile where we have two European partners. The opposite problem exists on the security side. I think they might not forgive me for saying this, but there are too many, I need some consolidation. I welcome the trend where they're moving towards a platform place. So the security supply chain is moving very much from lots and lots of best of breed solutions into a few larger ones who are building a platform. And that makes it a bit simpler to navigate and to work with fewer partners to develop that deep relationship and how we can build true synergies between our security solutions and our network solutions and also how we can share in research and innovation. So I think the trends are encouraging there. I don't want it to go as far as we've gone on the network side down to only two though, because we do need that

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:44):
Diversification of supply. And do you look to the team here at Gastro Park to develop internal solutions? Is that part of what you're asking them to do?

Howard Watson, BT (07:53):
Yes. Developing internal solutions has always been something that we've done at bt. We spend a lot on research and development and a lot of that is the development parts of that is writing software, working with our hardware vendors and adding components to that. That will always be a big part of what we do. We try and make sure we focus it on where we can build a competitive edge. If you can buy it in the marketplace and it doesn't differentiate me as a supplier to my customers, then let's buy it in the marketplace. But in the area of OSS systems historically, or some of the mobile applications, I think now in some of the sustainability solutions, the ability to switch networks off the part of the day, we're developing our own solutions there at the moment. So it will continue to be a big part of what we do.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:49):
So Howard, let's just finish on AI because it permeates everything that everybody's talking about these days. Not in this industry, but the developments in AI are incredibly rapid, is something new every week. And I guess BT's customers are looking for BT to be on top of all of this. How difficult is it to keep up with developments there and also integrate new AI tools and applications into your security platform so that you are up to speed?

Howard Watson, BT (09:18):
It's a great enabler for us, first and foremost for threat intelligence. So over on the BT research stand here, we're talking about a capability that we've built that can scan online articles really quickly, look for common threat actors that are often mentioned in online articles and start to summarize that so that we don't have to troll through them all as individuals. But also it is great for taking those threats that we've talked about, the 2000 every second, trying to find common patterns amongst those enabling the people, the humans in our cyber operations centers to visualize what's happening. So it's brilliant in that respect and we're starting to integrate that into the Eagle Eye product set that we talked about earlier so we can make that available to our customers. But you're right, there's a bit of an arms race going on because the threat actors are also starting to use ai. I mean particularly around spear phishing is the one at the moment. So that's creating a email which is so realistic to you that it's so difficult not to click on. So what we've got to do there is protect against the click having happened rather than really avoiding that, assuming it's going to happen. So that's just one example of where I'm seeing already particularly generative AI being used against us. So we'll keep our defenses up and we've got to keep working on it.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:50):
Okay. And do you feel that you are ahead of the game

Howard Watson, BT (10:53):
One step? No. I feel like we're winning. We are winning. We are winning.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:56):
Well, that's a very positive note to end on. Howard, thanks very much for joining us today. Great insights into what BT is doing in the security realm. Thank you, Ray.