Q&A for Kate Mollett

What advice would you give to women entering the tech field? Anything you wish you had known?

You need to have resilience and confidence when pursuing a career in the tech industry. I recall early in my career, especially in a meeting, where I was the only female present and insecurity would raise its head. I would worry about how to meaningfully contribute to the meeting, what was the expectation, that maybe it would be best if I just poured the tea or took the minutes. I didn’t.

Over the years, I’ve realised that helping women build resilience and confidence is one of the first steps to a successful career. The world isn’t equal yet. It has come a long way, but women are not yet on an equal footing, so it’s important that there are mentorship programmes for women – where they are surrounded by other confident women and are able to be empowered not only with core skills, but what some people would consider softer skills.

I am co-leading a women empowerment and upliftment programme at Veeam called Women in Green. I take this very seriously because I believe it’s paramount that women are supported by other women in order to best achieve their potential.

What makes you succeed in what you do?

Building resilience is the first step to a successful career and that is what I have worked on. It’s aspirational to pursue success, and grow personally and professionally and lead, despite the odds. There is a great sense of achievement when you are in a leadership position that is the result of your own hard work, resilience, confidence and competence.

Do you feel that there are enough women in the Tech? And why?

There’s a growing representation of women in tech and this number will continue to increase. Historically a young woman starting out not too long ago could have been unlikely to pursue a career in industries where she saw a predominantly male workforce, as it would have been difficult to confidently connect with the culture and find role models to learn from.

But this picture is changing and that’s why it’s important that women, who have a platform, contribute by creating an enabling environment to activate the potential of women in all industries.

What can you tell us about cybersecurity and how important it is?

Data theft is a booming business. With news of cyber breaches affecting nearly every sector and breaking almost weekly, it’s clear that all organisations face the same omnipresent threat of ransomware and hacking. While these threats are causing many CIOs to intensify their security efforts, the reality is that almost all computer systems are fallible to breach.

IT departments are constantly managing a trade-off between convenience and security. It’s the old adage ‘do you want it right now or do you want it right?’ While businesses are understandably keen to prioritise investing in digital strategies that deliver competitive advantage, cybersecurity and having an insurance policy against data breaches is always a priority.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to protecting against cyber-threats like ransomware and businesses have seen the full force of its impact in recent years. Cyber-criminals are well versed in exploiting weaknesses in enterprise IT systems and the same as it only takes one hole to sink a ship, one vulnerable entry-point can expose the business to crippling cyber-attacks.

For example, backups and archived data can be targeted by cyber-criminals as data which is not ‘live’, and consequently may go overlooked by IT departments. With a robust Cloud Data Management strategy, businesses can ensure that their backups are not the back door.

While businesses can outsource data management to cloud service providers (CSPs), they can never outsource responsibility for their data. So, IT departments must embrace Cloud Data Management and ensure all data is backed up, recoverable and secure across their entire data management provision.