Bob Burnett Of Brother International Corporation On Embedding Security in Product Design and Development

In the face of escalating threats from fraudsters and hackers, ensuring robust protection for mobile users’ personal information has become paramount. How do leaders in the smartphone security space ensure that their solutions are removing the vulnerabilities that current products on the market have? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Burnett.

Bob Burnett is the Director of B2B Solutions Deployment and Planning at Brother International Corporation. Using his decades of business technology experience, Bob oversees the collaboration of the product marketers, field engineers and business analysts, and helps to facilitate partnerships with enterprises across the United States to collaborate on their unique document-imaging and workflow requests. Bobs role focuses on supporting Brother customers to simplify company-specific business processes while maximizing cost efficiency and security.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I grew up in a middle-class family with an older sister in NJ. My father was a WWII combat veteran and a union electrician, and my mom was a stay-at-home mother until my father passed when I was thirteen. This had a big impact on the family; everyone had to contribute to make ends meet. This is where I started in this industry at fourteen at a local office supply and equipment dealer — below the legal age, but times were different then! Over the years, I worked at the dealer while going to school for electronics. At the time, I did not know that it would turn into a lifelong career that is over forty-four years now, but those early days taught me a lot about listening to the customer and delivering value to them.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

My career has allowed me to meet many people working in various industries and to travel all over the world. This has enabled me to learn about the needs of many industries and about the people who make them work. Learning about different cultures and industries makes my job exciting and different every day.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am currently working on two projects. The first is how Brother can offer better remote management of print and scan devices, making them more secure and effective with improved workflow processes. The second is also tied to workflow. As the demand for document digitization continues to grow, helping to improve data management and AI processes, I am working with our partners to offer compatibility with a wider range of workflow/scanning solutions.

How do emerging technologies like AI and machine learning influence the risk to the cybersecurity landscape?

Security needs to be at the top of any organization’s mind, and advancements in AI only increase the challenges of keeping an organization’s infrastructure and data safe. But even with the emerging AI technologies, security really starts with people. Foundationally, you need to have a strong education program for the teams, so they have a clear understanding of best security practices for the workflow within an organization and the ability to help identify threats and phishing attacks. From there, continued investment in the infrastructure with a strong security schema to keep pace with increasingly more advanced threats leveraging AI’s power is a must.

Ok, thank you. Let’s now move on to our main topic of Embedding Security in Product Design and Development. Can you share a few reasons why this is so critical in today’s cybersecurity threat environment?

My experience is one size does not fit all. Every customer has different needs and a different security schema. One of my team’s jobs is understanding each customer’s needs and presenting them with solutions. This includes building flexibility into a product from the start so it can be configured in various ways to meet multiple security requirements right out of the box. If a product can meet various security demands, including the ability to easily configure and deploy both within the enterprise as well as in remote locations, it increases efficiency while reducing the security risk.

“Security by Design” is a philosophy often mentioned in product development. Can you elaborate on this concept and explain its critical role in today’s manufacturing landscape?

In today’s market, any IOT device must have security as one of its core development pillars. At Brother, we have regular meetings with our security engineers and sales organizations worldwide to continually be aware of new threats or customer needs. This team then sets a development schedule and a plan for what product will receive new security enhancements and how we can potentially bring these enhancements to existing products. If you do not build the ability to enhance current products, you will find customers looking to replace you, so this needs to be a key component when designing and manufacturing IOT devices.

With the rise of IoT and connected devices, what challenges and opportunities do you foresee in ensuring security remains integral throughout the product development lifecycle?

With more devices connected, this enables better management and consistency across the fleet for security settings, making the organization better prepared and efficient in managing the ever-changing security landscape. Using products that are easy to deploy, remotely manage, and configure is key to best practices as more and more devices become part of an organization’s infrastructure. The flip side is that with the ever-increasing number of connected devices, ensuring they are all configured securely becomes a challenge. Very often, the small, connected devices are overlooked, and that is where the potential breach can happen. That is why strong deployment and management features are critical to any IOT device, enabling IT professionals to ensure all connected devices within their infrastructure are always up to date and using the correct configuration.

As Industry 4.0 and smart factories gain traction, how are strategies and approaches evolving to embed security in products that align with these futuristic manufacturing trends?

As mentioned above, as more IoT devices become part of the infrastructure, the hardware must have built-in security features, and policies must be implemented to ensure all these devices are configured to the necessary security schema. This becomes an increased challenge in smart factories. The benefits of all the sensors and other IoT devices that feed data into an AI process increasing efficiency is a tremendous value, but at the same time, if all this information is not kept secure, it could be catastrophic to a manufacturing facility if there is an attack or intrusion. With so many connected devices in the smart factory ecosystem security policies and capabilities must be a foundational item.

What are your “5 Best Practices for Embedding Security in Product Design and Development”?

1 . Continually monitoring the market and working with customers to identify new threats and security needs. Brother has regular global meetings to review current demands and threats. In addition, we also have a PSIRT team that responds to threats reported in the market. This ensures we have a proactive approach to security development.

2 . Have a strong and flexible product design that supports various security schemas. Each customer has different needs, so our product needs to be flexible in how it can be configured. We even had one customer who required the security to be set so strong that after the initial configuration, there was no way back to make any setting change in the future. If there is a change in security settings, they replace the hardware.

3 . Have third-party security testing on your device. Brother sends our devices for third-party security testing, which has uncovered issues that we were able to fix before a product was released to the market. It is always good practice to have independent experts test your device.

4 . As a manufacturer, you are the expert on your device. Our team also meets with customers on an ongoing basis, so we get to see many different security policies. In many cases, customers do not have strong security resources. Having the ability to provide consultative services with best practices with our device for these customers offers value as a trusted partner in helping to enhance a customer’s security footprint. Brother has helped many customers over the years to improve their security processes. As part of this, we leverage what we call triple-layer security.

1. Controlling who can access a device.
2. If a user can use a device, what features can they access and what security features are available to secure their documents and workflow.
3. All the flexibility in managing the various protocols and network settings to keep a device secure on the network.

5 . Have a strong ability to deploy security configurations and update machines with new security features. An example of this is we have several large customers with remote locations nationwide. Using Brother tools, these customers ensure that the devices connected to their infrastructure are always configured properly.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would say help your fellow coworkers and customers better understand the security threats in the world and their impact. Help design an all-encompassing security schema that covers everything from the infrastructure and workflows to employee education.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/brother-business-solutions/posts/?feedView=all

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-burnett/

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this interview!

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.