Editor’s note: The ISACA Now blog is featuring a series this year profiling ISACA professionals who are in pursuit of digital trust. Today, we profile Priya Mouli, Director at PwC’s Cybersecurity Consulting practice. For more digital trust member stories and resources from ISACA, visit www.isaca.org/digital-trust.
To address the biggest challenges in the technology field, Priya Mouli thinks there needs to be more collaboration and cooperation among the public and private sectors and industry entities/ groups (as defined below) globally.
Without a shared sense of purpose between entities such as academia, cross-industry communities and regulatory bodies, and having representatives from the public to account for what good data governance is from a customer standpoint, the problems in fields such as privacy and information security will only worsen, she said.
“Collaboration is where I think we need to move the needle faster, before it’s too late,” Priya said.
Priya earned an engineering degree and gained experience with financial services and technology companies early in her career before realizing she wanted to gravitate toward business, eventually zeroing in on cybersecurity risk. She currently is a director in PwC’s cybersecurity and privacy practice in Toronto, Canada.
Priya considers security, privacy, data ethics and collaboration to be essential components of digital trust, and is concerned that collaboration can be overlooked in that equation by companies that are preoccupied with profit over doing right by their customers.
“From a security standpoint, companies should start thinking about zero-trust security, and from a privacy standpoint, broaden the focus beyond the direct consumer to looking at it from data ethics and societal impact perspectives,” Priya said.
Priya keeps these principles in mind in her daily work regardless of the type or size of organization she advises, also championing cybersecurity and privacy as everyone’s responsibility. One of her future priorities is focusing on encouraging women and other underrepresented groups to enter cybersecurity and related STEM fields.
“I appreciate ISACA helping me pursue these passions by speaking at conferences and industry forums,” Priya said. “That can go a long way in bringing awareness of these important issues and facilitating more collaboration.”
One of her favorite ways to decompress from work is writing poetry and learning languages. While she generally steers clear of technology themes in her poems, she has been known to pen a few security limericks. More often, her inspirations are nature, objects of beauty and romantic-style poets like John Keats.
“Poetry really gives me the feeling where I can break away from reality, transcend into another world, be purely imaginative and unplug from busy daily life,” Priya said.
Her other major personal interest is travel, with a trip to Africa to witness the famed global wildebeest migration high on her upcoming travel bucket list. Seeing the world has long been a high priority for her.
Priya grew up in India and spent close to a decade in the US, as well as academic and working stints across Europe and China.
“I do love learning about different cultures, learning different languages and appreciating people’s different thinking styles,” she said. “Global exposure really helps you appreciate different cultures, backgrounds and thinking styles, and can add richness in diversity in thought and action.