ASHISH KHANNA
THE TELCO INTERVIEW
For decades, the core mandate for telecommunications providers serving the enterprise segment has been centred around delivering faster and more reliable connectivity. Today, that mandate is being fundamentally rewritten. As retailers plunge headfirst into the complex world of embedded finance, integrating financial services like payments, lending and insurance into non-financial platforms, they are transforming the industry landscape. The opportunity for telcos is no longer just to sell quicker and bigger, but to leverage network intelligence and infrastructure to deliver high-margin managed security services, moving decisively up the value chain and transforming the enterprise customer relationship from a utility contract into a strategic partnership.
ASHISH KHANNA
TITLE: SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL SECURITY SOLUTIONS
COMPANY: VERIZON BUSINESS INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS
As Senior Managing Director, Ashish Khanna leads Verizon’ s Global Security Solutions team, delivering complex security consulting and solutions to enterprise clients worldwide. He has nearly 25 years of industry experience.
Navigating a landscape where every retail transaction is a potential security incident means a new playbook. Ashish Khanna, Senior Managing Director of Global Security Solutions at Verizon Business, provides the critical intelligence for the strategy. As Verizon releases its Data Breach Investigations Report( DBIR), Ashish details the threats not as problems for retailers to solve alone, but as distinct service opportunities for the telcos that form their digital backbone. Telcos today move beyond selling connectivity and sell trust, resilience and quantified risk reduction, which are the new key drivers of enterprise average revenue per user( ARPU) and customer loyalty.
From bulk data to stealth signals: A new traffic profile to secure The nature of the target has changed the nature of the traffic. The historical focus of cybercriminals on bulk payment card data created a relatively straightforward traffic profile to monitor. The new focus, however, is on stealth and subtlety. Threat actors, operating with a ruthless focus on efficiency, have pivoted away from the now heavily fortified payment data streams. As Ashish notes, attacking payment systems now requires an adversary“ to do more hard work to get it there.” As a result, they have recalibrated their efforts.
The new prize for bad actors is the rich personal and behavioural data held in customer loyalty accounts. According to Ashish, it means“ the focus has primarily shifted from payment card data to other types of data that are easier to access.”
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