IBM inaugurates its Cyber ​​Academy in Rome, Rebattoni: “With AI and research we know frontier technologies”

Panic always comes on Friday evening. When the offices are closed or about to close. When the weekend is upon us, attention drops and the damage is greater. The perfect time for a cyber attack. The victim is a fictional company, Pon Srl. But this too is a fictional Friday evening. How people work imaginatively inside the control room of IBM’s Cyber ​​Academy. But by simulating cyber attacks the company teaches managers, communications staff and IT security staff how to behave during a real attack. Everything is simulated. Everything is extremely similar to real. The phones ring with requests for help and journalists looking for information, the social sentiment of the company’s customers is simulated on the screens (Pon deals with finance, loans and investments in this fantasy game, a bank). These are the parameters to keep under control during a cyber attack. Before everything else happens. The management, the reaction, the solution to the problem.

IBM’s academy opened in March. And the IT giant in Rome offers personalized training courses to help Italian companies deal with these problems. The need, sometimes urgent, to strengthen digital culture on cybersecurity, on artificial intelligence, on technologies related to quantum computing. The framework is designed to help managers, experts and leaders face all the challenges of today’s digital and interconnected economy, with particular attention to the security of systems and processes.

According to the IBM study “2023 Cost of a Data Breach report”, in Italy the average cost of a data breach last year was 3.55 million euros, up from 3.03 million euros in 2021. The days needed to identify and contain a data breach is of 235 days. In this context, the Italian organizations analyzed that have already adopted artificial intelligence and automation in security have seen shorter breach life cycles, on average 112 days, and significantly lower costs, on average 1, 56 million euros less than organizations that have not yet done so.

“The threat of cyber attacks is one of the major risks that companies and countries are facing today, in an increasingly complex market due to the impacts determined by geopolitics and an epochal technological evolution. To face these challenges it is necessary that, alongside the adoption of the best technological solutions, a cultural change is promoted: only adequately trained and prepared human capital will be able to make a difference in tackling cyber risks as well as in guiding AI responsibly”, he said during the presentation of the Cyber ​​Academy Stefano Rebattoni, President and CEO of IBM Italy. “This is why we are opening the IBM Cyber ​​Academy in Rome, a place where together with the best IBM experts in cybersecurity, AI and research it will be possible to learn about frontier technologies, align cyber priorities between the public and private sectors and encourage the development of skills for resilient organizations capable of facing the future”.

Today, according to IBM data, 40% of Italian citizens would not worry or do anything about the risks related to IT security and 43% of the ruling class would never have received any training. IBM courses try to provide an answer to this problem. “Unfortunately, zero risk does not exist, and the question to ask is not whether an accident can happen, but rather when it will happen, how serious it will be, and how capable we will be of mitigating its effects. The National Cybersecurity Agency is responsible for monitoring the cyber threat also by putting public and private interlocutors in contact to raise their defenses, with a continuous exchange of data and intervenes to intercept incidents, trying to contain them and restore the affected systems. We have managed many cases of accidents, in hospitals as well as in public transport services”, said the deputy director general of the ACN, Nunzia Ciardi.

“As an Agency, however, we also intervene to train professionals of which we face a dramatic deficit in the world and in Italy. Therefore, the fact of having created an environment in which one can experience live in a simulation what it means to suffer a cyber attack is an opportunity to understand its effects more directly and prepare to face them. Learning to react in a safe context can also serve to fill a fundamental deficiency, such as the lack of awareness of risks in a world whose riskiness we do not perceive directly with our senses and which, precisely for this reason, is sometimes more dangerous”, Ciardi added.