Outgoing 8200 commander: "Organizations don't know where their information is"

Assaf Kochan, the outgoing commander of the IDF’s 8200 intelligence unit and co-founder of a company still in stealth mode, spoke at the Mind the Tech London conference, held by Calcalist, Leumi and LabTech, about the unit he headed until last year and what's leading the tech world today: "I was in a unit with very talented people who are thrown into an environment where they need to be at their peak. Moving to the cloud world is changing the way businesses operate. The cloud today actually ‘devours’ everything. If in the past we talked about software ‘devouring’ the world, then today cloud platforms ‘devour’ the world.

"The cloud is a huge challenge, especially for organizations that need to move to it and especially in terms of security and capabilities," Kochan added. "The cloud is a great platform to discuss security issues. There is a huge change in the attitude of organizations to the world of data when in the past organizations defended what is inside the organization and that was enough, but today data has no limit. With the help of AI, the boundaries are even greater and broader.

"Every company needs to understand that someone will succeed in hacking into it. This is a basic assumption that every organization needs to understand, prepare itself for, and be prepared to deal with in the best way," he warned. "The traditional way to protect the organization was to surround and protect everything with barriers, but that no longer works. It is better to defend in a way that will protect the significant and important things. With the help of the new technologies of AI, machine learning and more, it is now possible to create protection systems that are similar and suitable for the new era of distributed data."