Secon Cyber Leadership Interviews
Janakan Nadarajah in conversation with Koert Wilmink, Global IT Infrastructure and Security Manager, Fugro JN: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came into information technology and security? KW: I started my career in 1986, so it’s a long time ago. I started as a Unix engineer, I still remember it, AT&T System V Release 4. I also was introduced with TCP/IP. There was a lot of serial networking in those days. There was hardly any TCP/IP, so I was introduced in TCP/IP and networking. That’s how I started and grew in IT. I did infrastructure security for many years, but for the last 25 years, it’s been more senior leadership roles, especially global roles. And I’m now five months with Fugro, it’s a very exciting company and security there is very important. How I started with security in those days was with a book written by Clifford Stoll. I don’t know if you remember that from 1989. It was called The Cuckoo’s Egg. It was the first book I think there was about espionage and hacking and was about a German that hacked into American universities and military systems and sold that information to Russia, to the KGB. But in those days, hacking and security was already important. I moved from Unix into networking because there was 10
nobody there who knew anything about TCP/IP, so I was introducing security as well. I was in Silicon Valley with Netscape, and also with Internet Security Scanner, ISS in those days, and I think I was the first certified person in the Netherlands for the Check Point 1 Firewall, so that’s how I was introduced into security and a lot of the challenges are still the same. I had the chance also to move into the SAP space and do SAP implementation in Europe. I like infrastructure security. It’s just fantastic, right?
JN: You’re part of a large enterprise organisation with a global footprint. How do you make sure that security remains consistent across a global enterprise and how do you address the regional variations and requirements across different parts of the global estate? KW: In my 25 years of experience in global roles, there are many areas, right? You have local laws and regulations you have to adhere to, so in some cases data needs to stay local. You have data retention poli-
SECON CYBER
