Presenting our team: Olaf Streutker

Olaf Streutker has worked at ABN AMRO for more than 25 years. From general operational risk management, he has grown along with developments within cybersecurity. 'As a strategic advisor, I am involved in all major security initiatives and mainly work for our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Martijn Dekker. I am responsible for various public-private projects and, among other things, coordinator of the PCSI programme,' says Streutker.

Since when have you been involved in PCSI and what is your role?

As ABN AMRO, we were co-founders of PCSI's predecessor, the Shared Research Programme Cyber Security (SRP, 2014-2020), so we were involved in PCSI from the very beginning. Whereas the SRP focused mainly on the financial sector, with PCSI we are looking more broadly. I am a great supporter of that. Because it makes us better able to arm ourselves against digital threats. I became coordinator from ABN AMRO already during the SRP and I continued that when the PCSI programme started in 2020. Within that role, I take care of enthusing colleagues to participate in workshops and staffing the projects that are actually launched. These can be more employee behaviour-focused projects but also real hardcore IT problems. In general, it works well to find colleagues for the PCSI projects. Of course, everyone is busy, but I stress that investing working time in innovative PCSI projects also pays off. By explaining that it is an opportunity to learn from others and develop yourself further, and that participating in such a project can also add value to the problems you encounter in your day-to-day work, it works well to find colleagues willing to participate.

Which projects are you involved in?

We are actually always involved in all 'Ideation' sessions. During these creative workshops, employees from all PCSI partners jointly generate innovative project ideas for each trend in the field of cybersecurity. Ultimately, one idea per trend is developed into a project proposal. Via a Dragons' Den, these proposals are assessed based on various criteria, such as the 'wow factor' or the clarity of the problem definition. If the assessment is positive, the project can start in an exploration phase in which it must be established whether the project is indeed worthwhile.

Among other things, I myself contributed content to the Automated Data Labelling project. In this project, we looked at how to get a better grip on non-structured data - think e-mails, text documents and audio and video files -, how to label, classify and ultimately protect this data in an automated way. We used various machine learning (ML) techniques to develop a reliable model for this. We came to the realisation that it is necessary to distinguish between labelling ('objectively determining whether a document contains personal data, for example') and classifying ('which labelled data do you want in which container and how should I then protect it?'). Classification, unlike labelling, is a subjective assessment. Another great example of a project we contributed to is AIwareness. Within this project, a self-learning module was developed that can detect targeted phishing on employees.

Where are opportunities and challenges for the future?

Most of all, I hope we succeed in attracting more partners to PCSI. Everyone faces manpower shortages, which makes this a challenge. However, if we succeed and by further broadening and managing to involve even more experts from different companies and industries, we can achieve even more than we already do. Because by investing together we all achieve more, I am convinced. The more quality you put into a project, the more results you get out of it. One of the challenges is that we could perhaps be a bit stricter if, in the initial exploration phase, an idea from an Ideation session turns out not to work. When we have started something full of enthusiasm, it is sometimes difficult to let it go and that is understandable. But it is worth something to stop in time, besides, even a negative outcome of an exploration is valuable. By applying more focus in assessing the added value of the project, we can ensure that we mainly start working on innovations that really have a chance of becoming successful.