Building Security Relationships Through Transparency with Andrea Rohr

Andreas Rohr: The most convincing story for works council who were actually not there to prevent security or the company doing the right things, they're there to make sure that the data is not abused against the employee's rights. It's their mission, their task, and it's a valid one. When I was in a CISO position in such companies where there were actually a strong works council, the best relationship is if you're really being transparent to what you do, why you're doing that?

Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Security Visionaries. You just heard from today's guest, Andreas Rohr, CTO at DCSO. Aligning organizations on security requires many skills, most importantly, transparency. From establishing top-down communication to collaborating with work councils, transparency answers many questions along the way. Like, who has access to the sensitive information? What is an organization's appetite for risk? And how is the data of employees protected? Before we dive into Andreas's interview, here's a brief word from our sponsor. This Security Visionaries podcast is powered by the team at Netskope. At Netskope, we are redefining cloud, data and network security with a platform that provides optimized access and zero trust security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. To learn more about how Netskope helps customers be ready for anything on their sassy journey, visit N-E-T-S-K-O-P-E.com. Without further ado, please enjoy episode 20 of Security Visionaries with Andreas Rohr, CTO at DCSO and your host, Mike Anderson.

Mike Anderson: Welcome to today's episode of Security Visionaries. I'm your host, Mike Anderson. I'm the Chief Digital and Information Officer here at Netskcope. Today, we are joined by Andreas Rohr who's joining us from Germany. How are you doing today, Andreas?

Andreas Rohr: Oh, very good. Thanks for pronouncing the name very nicely.

Mike Anderson: I'm super excited about this conversation today because when we think about cyber security, you've done some very interesting things around bringing people together in the DACH region and thinking about companies of all sizes as you think about the cyber topic. And so can you tell us more about DCSO, how it started, the mission you've got, what you're trying to accomplish and how you're working with companies?

Andreas Rohr: So DCSO stands for German Cyber Security Organization. So the D is for Deutsche, for those that are maybe familiar with the language. And what basically four companies in the DACH region; Allianz, BASF, Volkswagen and Bayer, you might have heard of, some of the largest companies in Europe, they saw that they should basically combine forces and get exchanging ideas with other peers of themselves to not reinvent always the security topics by themselves and bringing together their experts. Because they have one thing in common, which is 90%, 80% of what they're challenging and security is more or less the same despite that they're competing on the market. And second, the talents are not enough on the market. So bringing them together under one roof and tasking them with things they're all interested in, would make things even better. And resource enabled testing of new ideas. So this is one of the things. The second one is they all have their supply chain they're dependent on. And this was seven years ago, so supply ch