What was the setting?
Two countries, two languages, two ways of doing business, and the same problem in both. Telecoms run some of the most exposed infrastructure a country has, under regulators who do not accept good intentions as evidence. The work meant several security workstreams at once, a global team working alongside local ones, and the discipline to keep a Jakarta morning and a Tokyo afternoon pointed at the same goal.
What did I do?
In Indonesia the job was to make security provable. I delivered programmes that met the region’s rules, from the readiness assessment to the implementation, and in six months the major operator’s NIST compliance rose by more than 30%. I wrote the SOC roadmap, improved threat detection, and automated the response to the attack patterns we already knew, so the analysts could spend their attention on the ones we did not.
In Japan the operator was young and the pace was different. I led the security analysis and the automation, and joined the custom tools the team had built to the SOC’s SIEM, so what they detected became something the whole operation could act on. When a cybersecurity emergency came, I ran security awareness for the executives, because in an emergency the most important decisions are made by people who do not read logs. The findings I wrote for the board shaped the strategic roadmap that followed.
What came of it?
Beyond the compliance numbers, two things. A strategic partnership with a major Indonesian telecom for complete security services, and new partners and client implementations for a vulnerability scanner product. And a lesson I have kept: a control that works in one culture and not in another was never really about the control.