Now is not forever: Building a career in the age of AI and cybersecurity

In this talk, the speaker, a cloud solution architect at Microsoft, shares her journey from feeling hopeless during a challenging period in her life to becoming a cybersecurity professional. She discusses two pivotal moments that shaped her path: learning to code after being encouraged by her boss and pivoting to cybersecurity during the pandemic. The speaker emphasizes the importance of community access and self-education in her career development, including the invaluable resources provided by platforms like YouTube and open-source tools. Additionally, she highlights the significant evolution of artificial intelligence in the tech ecosystem, which has transformed how professionals work and interact with information. The speaker concludes with insights about the necessity of integrating cybersecurity into development processes, the role of human experience in the age of AI, and the ongoing need for curiosity and a growth mindset.

[music] >> Hello world. I know I since I learned how to code this been my favorite thing to say. So, we all are shaped by a moment in our career, right? Like you know even just careers just life. And for me I have two moments that actually shaped who I am today. The first one 17 years ago. As you heard, yes, I was homeless for almost a

year. I had to quit school. So technically I have no degree. And one thing that I still till this day remember was the feeling of hopelessness. And I'm sure we've all had that moment where we are going through something and we just don't seem to think that there is a way out. And during that process I thought, you know what? This is definitely going to be my

life now. I was sleeping in metro stations, wandering around with no objective, no purpose. And life just felt empty, hopeless. one thing that I kept daydreaming about or say night dreaming about was what comes next. And in my head I'd built this life where I just had a minimum job, I had a roof over my head, I had food. And that's all I hoped for. And then

when life started picking up, I was in a foster care system and then I had to you know go back to work. And one day while I was working at the University of Brussels as a receptionist, my boss came up to me and she said, "Nadia, I want you to learn how to code." I was like, "What do you mean?" And I've always been a bit of

a geek. I'm a gamer. So I watched The IT Crowd and if anyone has ever watched The IT Crowd, well I always identified as the woman because I felt like I was not knowledgeable enough. I'm competent enough to learn to code. That seemed like a crazy thing, especially like knowing that I don't have a degree, never actually finished school. So, when I was going to the IT

department to learn, the first thing he made me print out was hello world. And that was a magical moment. I'm sure we all remember. I mean, I hope we all remember the day we actually wrote the first line of code. And ever since that moment, it kind of defined who I am Moving on to 5 years ago. 5 years ago, we were in the middle of a

pandemic. I was basically traveling the world, teaching people how to code, sharing my story and inspiring the next generation and the current generation of women and men to pursue technology as a lever to be able to basically build a life that they can dream about. And then the pandemic happened. And then we were in a lockdown. So, same thing. We I think felt hopeless. There was not

really an idea of, "Okay, what comes next?" And for me, it was actually quite particular because I had a toddler at home that was going crazy. And I was pregnant with my second child. And I was about to be divorced. I was like, "I don't want to live a life where I am not in control of my freedom. I've lived that life before. This was definitely not

going to be it." And I had this crazy idea. I was like, "Hmm, let me learn cybersecurity." And why did I learn cybersecurity? Because the person I was married [clears throat] to that time was working in cybersecurity. And I looked at him. I was like, "You know what? I'm going to do what you do." So, during the 1 year while we were in lockdown, this is what

my life looked like. Pretty much. I took this crazy journey of while pregnant and then while after I gave birth, I learned my job using community, using YouTube, open source knowledge, resources to basically test, run labs and everything else in between to be well, to do what I do today. So, to imagine that two of the most important moments of my life were defined by first of

all, getting access to community, getting access to knowledge to be able to teach myself the fundamentals of cybersecurity, to be able to be hired by Microsoft and it's been 5 years that I've been working with them and I work as a cloud solution architect and my role is to help customers become more resilient by first of all, implementing the right fundamentals, making sure that your identities are

secure, your endpoints the applications you have in your organizations are also secure. And one thing that I've learned in the 5 years is that nothing ever goes to waste. Cuz today, thanks to my introduction to the Hello World, let's say um coding world, even today as a cybersecurity practitioner, I still help companies understand the importance of building security into your pipeline. And I have to admit over

the years, there were a couple of myths that I believed, no longer believing, but I kind of believed it and this two timelines in my life forced me to accept something that I think we all know is that now is not forever. Now is not forever in a sense where things come and go. Products change. Uh new threats happen, emerge every day. the life we might be

living today, or let's say the moments we're living today are not defined forever. Even though it feels like it, cuz trust me, if you had told me 5 years ago, or even 17 years ago that I would be here standing in front of you talking to you about AI, cybersecurity, and saying that actually everything turned out okay, I wouldn't believe you. actually this year marks my fifth

anniversary at Microsoft. And I thought, you know what? In the five years, what have I learned? You know, what what has impacted me? What has, you know, opened my eyes, changed the way I see the world? And the first thing is AI. Because five years ago when I started, AI was barely a whisper at Microsoft. And you know, we were basically hearing in the corridors, whispering corridors

that, "Yeah, new technology, Copilot is coming. Pretty awesome stuff, right?" But then, over the years we got to see how much adoption it was done in terms of the applications we are using, the resources we access today have AI embedded inside. But the thing is that AI has changed the way we work. For example, in terms of speed, accessing information. In the past, we relied on us

going through Google dorking to be able to analyze. We all know what Google dorking is. I hope we do. We have to analyze the information, we have to research to be able to find the necessary information to be able to do our job. But we no longer have that time in terms of speed, research to be able to do this by ourselves. So, we need things that

can basically accelerate the access to information. And that's how for me AI has changed how I do my everyday job. In terms of technology or implementations that I do not know, I no longer have to spend months trying to understand, figure it out, where I can just basically ask AI to resume some sort of, let's say, implementation, explain it explain to me how it works. And then,

obviously, do the lab, do the testing to figure out how and if troubleshooting is needed, it's even better because it can walk me through the, let's say, checklist that I need to go through to be able to solve this. And also in terms of automation, right? So we can automate a bunch of things that that take too much of our time on everyday process, right? So it

means for example, in my case I hate emails. I really do. And I'm not sure I'm sure I'm not I'm not the only one, but every meeting that I have with my customer, I have to send out a summary email. And now with AI being in place, meaning that I no longer need to start writing down and just turn on the transcribe while I focus with the

customer and focus on understanding their challenges and then you know, working with them. And it's more about adapt adaptability. So being able to adapt to the changing world is one of the skills that I have learned through my life because if you don't adapt, you die. Right? That's kind of like the business model. We need to be able to adapt to situations as quickly as possible so

that we can keep moving forward. So by adopting AI, by using AI as a part of your day-to-day uh life process, uh to study, to do your job or to just overall, you know, just uh to leverage your understanding is one way that I always encourage people around me to do because it's important to adapt to the changing world, otherwise we'll be left behind and that's not

really the goal. But then most people are you know, we hear the whole dooms about AI basically taking everything away from us. And yes, a lot of things have changed since AI came out and since we have implemented them across organizations, but you know, speaking to customers I from my experience is that I don't believe that AI can fully replace us. Why? Because at the end of

the day, we have experience. Meaning that over the years I remember always having this feeling that I wish I was born 10 years ago with today's youngness, I guess. Because I felt like I was never good enough. I was never knowledgeable enough. And I would speak to people who had 20 25 years of experience, and I was like, "Oh my god, I wish I had what was

in your head." But the thing is, thanks to that experience, you're able to connect the dots. You're able to understand situations and quickly respond to them. And that's something cannot be given to an AI. You can give them all the necessary models information, but at the end of the day, being able, based off on real-life experience, connecting the dots, it's something that cannot be replaced. It's a

human factor. Second is curiosity. You know, we execute tasks. We tell it what to do. But at the end of the day, it requires someone to tell them what to Hopefully, we won't We will reach that day when it will be able to make its own decision, but we're not there yet. So, for now, we have our curiosity, our need to understand, our need to leverage, you

know, our our our questions to be able to get answers. And that's one thing that cannot be And then the next is making choices. Making the right choices at the right time, at that millisecond, based off on your experience and your curiosity and the questions. So, for me, for today, I believe that we are still a important factor when it comes to work, when it comes to

um you know, business, when it comes to open community, we play a huge role in it. So, we won't be replaced. And talking about, you know, AI and all these things, that means that in terms of gaining knowledge, in terms of, you know, growth, I have a My mentor told me something one day. He said, "Uh Nadia, don't be a know-it-all. Be a learn-it-all." We are moving

towards a world where we need to be able to learn and know things in a sense of to be able to be impactful to do our job. My job, I think 20% of my contract says that I need to be learning in terms of technology advancement, cybersecurity threats and attacks needs to be basically understood so that I can help our customers be able to secure. So, that

means that you need to have that learning learn-it-all mindset to be able to grow and to be able to basically, you know, do your job. And in tech and cybersecurity, I feel like it's a huge advantage. We won't be in this field if we hated learning. It's part of the requirement. I keep telling everybody, you can't if you don't if you want to work in cybersecurity because

of the money, please do that. But, at some point, you will step back because the amount of time you need to invest in your knowledge and your improvement advancement is something that you need to learn to love. So, shifting the mindset to be able to learn-it-all will help you first of all adapt, right? What new technology, what new threat, what new vulnerability. Those things require you to

be able to research and utilize AI to be able to get to the information as quickly as possible. And saying I don't know, I know in tech is something that's seen as bad, but I saying I don't know was one of the biggest things that I had to learn uh early in my career because I barely I I did not know anything about cybersecurity. Everything I knew

today started from that picture of learning it on YouTube. So, over time, I had to say I don't know and I kept failing and failing and failing and only to be able to wait stand up and try again. So, learn-it-all. Next, cybersecurity is no longer optional. Over the years, uh we we would we we would see films, Mr. Robot hacking, looked pretty cool, right? But, the world

kind of felt like this is something that's happening in the back end. This is not my problem. You know, this is big corporation's problem. And over the especially 5 years ago since the pandemic when we had to sort of like shift the way we work to be able to provide remote access to resources so that companies and businesses can basically be able to still be operational and

do their job. Now, the just to give you some numbers, 600 million cyber security per day are stopped by Microsoft around the world. 600. That's basically every second there's a cyber security attack, whether it's identity-based or even just overall infrastructure or employee every minute, every second there is a cyber security threat happening. So, cyber security is no longer optional in a sense where especially as a developer,

when I talk to dev dev teams and and so on, I do have to admit when I used to code, I didn't think about cyber security, to be honest. It wasn't on my mind. My mind was build, test, deploy. That was always the process, right? But, the one thing I never thought about is, "Hmm, is this repository secure? Am I doing Are Is there any secrets inside?"

You know, all those fundamental questions. Well, today that's no longer optional because first of all, we have attackers using advanced technologies to be able to scan, analyze, and be able to detect secrets, vulnerabilities. We have heard about um recent I think it was last year recent uh attacks from big corporations where the reason behind the attack was because the the the attacker basically found secrets in Slack

or in their channels or even within their code. So, cyber security is no longer an option. It has to be built into your process, right? From the moment you write your code, from the moment you build the architectural design, we need to first of all think from a security perspective, "Am I implementing the right practices? Am I following the right guidance?" And there are a couple of

amazing open source tools that you can use to be able to just go through the analysis to be able to check your code before you deploy. So, this is one of the things that I do encourage developers, startups when they when I talk to them about, "Okay, you don't have money to pay the big corporations." Well, we have amazing technologies that can be used today. And talking

about community, I wouldn't be here, to be honest, if it wasn't for the community that had spent time I remember Stack Overflow when I learned to code there was no, you know, this this this this whole momentum. So, you had to rely on Stack Overflow and all the other coding communities to be able to ask questions when you couldn't basically go through your challenges. And thanks to

the people that basically invested time in answering maybe what I felt at that time was like stupid helped me basically advance my career. Even today, from a cybersecurity perspective, there are amazing communities, DevOps or SecOps, who are there to be able to just talk and help you be able to understand and reach, you reach the level of understanding at a quicker rate. Now, mentors are also crucial.

That's the something that I also learned in the 5 years to have mentors who are there based off on the experience. So, to be able to be mentored, to be able to get those insights and be able to gain understanding from someone who has been doing this for 25 years, I don't think you can beat that. You can ask Copilot to give you understanding on something, but

when someone has been working in the field for 25 years and basically has seen every single challenge, and he has the willingness to share that information with you, I think that can have a huge impact into someone's life. So, being here, I'm guessing you believe in the same thing as I do. Open community community do have impact in your career and in your just overall life. So,

I am I am because of the people who surround me, because of the people who supported me, and that's because of the community that I was able to build in the five years that I've been doing this. Five years later, well, life is full. Right? I'm still here. I'm still fighting. I'm still learning. But at the end of the day, one thing that this two moments that

I talked to you about has really um keeps reminding me is that now is not Life does move on. So, as much as it might feel like you're you're unsure of what the future holds tomorrow, keep on investing and keep on studying. Keep on growing with the purpose of tomorrow will come and whatever comes, we will be able to handle it. Thank you. >> [applause]