This week, Ralph Severini takes a seat on Speed Data. The Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance at Amazon Web Services discusses how generative AI will shape the future, shares his passion for jazz, and recounts how his group of former colleagues helped thwart the first-ever cybercriminal.
This week, Ralph Severini takes a seat on Speed Data. The Global Leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance at Amazon Web Services discusses how generative AI will shape the future, shares his passion for jazz, and recounts how his group of former colleagues helped thwart the first-ever cybercriminal.
Ralph Severini: you know, I, I mentioned Bell Labs and that's kind of where I started from, on the tech side, I worked in a group, actually, that caught the first cyber criminal, Robert Morris. Do you recognize the Robert Morris worm? his father actually worked at the labs, and he created the first internet worm, and, you know, one of our groups, a group I was in, actually, nailed him.
Megan Garza: so he created the malicious worm and his father, his role was to protect.
Ralph Severini: he got his son to work there as a, you know, intern during the summer, and he was, he was one of the heads, his father was one of the heads of cybersecurity, so that was interesting
Megan Garza: makes for an interesting, uh, family conversation.
Megan Garza: Welcome to Speed Data, quick conversations with cybersecurity leaders. I'm your host, Megan Garza. This [00:01:00] week, I get to speak with my friend, Ralph Severini, the global leader of Insurance Alliances and Commercial Insurance at Amazon Web Services. Good to see you, Ralph.
Ralph Severini: Good to see you, Megan. Um, I'm in the cold and I think you're in the warmth. So, um,
Megan Garza: Well, today's, today's an anomaly, so I'm right there with you. Ralph owns the strategy and business development for global commercial insurance at AWS. with 30 plus years in tech and financial services, Ralph has worked in everything from brokerage, to underwriting, to risk management.
Megan Garza: The knowledge buff studied mathematics and engineering at Rutgers and has a master's degree in science and in business. He put his MBA to use when he formed a jazz record label to produce and market jazz, recording internationally renowned jazz artists. That is so cool!
Ralph Severini: some days I wish I was back doing that.
Megan Garza: Yeah. Speaking of international, your position at AWS has global [00:02:00] oversight. How do you address concerns around cloud security and data sovereignty and global markets?
Ralph Severini: Megan, one of our main benefits at AWS is our worldwide footprint. You know, and this enables customers to deploy globally, literally within minutes. AWS has 34 regions and 108 availability zones. You know, as you can imagine, our customers are more likely than not to be operating in more than one region because their customers are located around the
Megan Garza: Right.
Ralph Severini: And then secondly, AWS customers always retain ownership and control of their content. So regardless of where a request comes from customer data, we don't disclose customer content, unless it's required to do so with a legally valid order, we also notify the customer before disclosing their content so they could seek protection from any disclosure, you know, and then let me also say [00:03:00] that customers can choose to encrypt their content and we, we provide tools, um, that they can use to do so. I think you're kind of doing the same, so, or you can, or suggest those.
Ralph Severini: You know, our customers can choose from a number of supported third party solutions. you know, and then customers can choose which region to store the data in. You know, they, our customers, own and control the data, where it's stored, how it's stored, you know, who has access, and we don't move data between regions without the customer's consent.
Megan Garza: Yeah. Sounds like they have a lot of control over. That's great.
Megan Garza: And what is your approach to balancing regulatory compliance, you mentioned, you know, legalities, with the need for an agile cybersecurity solution?
Ralph Severini: as you probably know, our, our infrastructure is built to satisfy, you know, pretty rigid security requirements We have over 300 security compliance and governance [00:04:00] services and features.
Ralph Severini: 143 supported security standards, including, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS, NIST, you know, the rest of
Megan Garza: All the acronyms.
Ralph Severini: You know, all the, all the acronyms, exactly. So, you know, we've been in business for 18 years, we've been delivering cloud services to millions of customers around the world, We believe we have the most operational scale and experience of, you know, any of the cloud providers. And we often say, and I use this expression a lot, um, around my family, there's no compression algorithm for experience. Um, and, and that's because you can't learn certain lessons, you know, until you get to different levels of scale and experience.
Ralph Severini: So experience is important. we, you know, we have a wide variety of documents, encryption tools, and other guidance, which we can and do share with you. with our customers, and we have thousands of partners like yourselves, you know, that offer [00:05:00] those hundreds of tools, features, and other advice to our customers, whether it's for network security or access control or other things.
Megan Garza: And what role does cloud computing play in modernizing insurance operations?
Ralph Severini: Yeah. We often talk about cost as being. kind of the number one play, but, to build data centers, you have to purchase the hardware for those data centers. You know, you got to spend money on hiring training staff to run those data centers. You got to pay for the electricity and power, To turn the data centers on, with the cloud, you can avoid a lot of those costs, and I started with cost, but that's really not the number one reason I think any enterprise is going to the cloud. It's usually for the agility and speed for which you can, you know, ratchet up applications,
Megan Garza: Yeah, you can definitely ramp up a lot quicker. And are there specific emerging technologies that you believe to be just kind of game changers for the insurance industry?
Ralph Severini: Yeah, I guess if I [00:06:00] didn't talk about AI and Gen AI, I wouldn't be really talking here. So, you know, Amazon's been really kind of tackling this for, for a number of decades. If you think about it, we use it you know, Amazon uses it to optimize our supply chain, create better search for our customers and the retail side, and deliver new experiences like Alexa.
Ralph Severini: You know, it's like all of that is not at the AWS side that. You know, to a large extent comes from the innovation and AI use at the Amazon side. You know, Gen AI is kind of this next step in artificial intelligence, and it's going to, you know, arguably reinvent every application we interact with. You know, whether we're at home or at work and, And, um, we're seeing it where, you know, in Gen AI, where customer service, um, reps are answering questions more, you know, more easily, precisely. And you're seeing this with intelligent chatbots today, as you probably [00:07:00] recognize them on your, you know, interactions on the net and buying things.
Megan Garza: How does AI influence fraud prevention in your industry?
Ralph Severini: Gen AI, for one, can, amplify the exposure to bad actors. And bad actors are, you know, are generating malicious code. It's not a possibility. I think it's a reality. you know, and I think I may have mentioned this to you, but I'll repeat it for this. about 20 years ago, I predicted that someone would break the Texas Hold'em online game, you know, and a group of bored mathematicians in Eastern Russia, broke the online game through some.
Ralph Severini: They say simple techniques. I haven't seen exactly how they did this, but you know, the number of permutations in, Texas Hold'em is like something like 10 to the 67th power, which they say is comparable to the number of atoms in the universe. and yeah, so I mean this large number and here's some guys in Eastern Russia with some math, some card, you know, [00:08:00] savvy and few laptops.
Ralph Severini: Few laptops, literally, and they break this. So, this is a scary thing that, you know, there's plenty of bad actors out there still, and they can easily incorporate Gen AI to build malicious code. um, you know, these are some of the areas that I think, will really consume Gen AI and more of the AI techniques.
Ralph Severini: You know, fraud prevention and awareness. I mean, there's technology companies like Veris that have been using these for years. where they're modeling, fraud and they can score an individual claim and then pass that on to the claims adjuster. So hopefully perpetrators, are not gonna be able to fool insurers quite at ease as they had been in the past.
Ralph Severini: So, that's the good part.
Megan Garza: Yeah. You and I share a love of Hold'em and that actually made me think, I got an email the other day from the Wall Street Journal that, um, the gambling and gaming industry, were targeted with more attacks than any other industry in 2024. So,
Ralph Severini: [00:09:00] that. Yeah.
Megan Garza: so kind of switching gears a little bit here, what skills do you think make cybersecurity professionals great at what they do?
Ralph Severini: you know, that's a, that's a good question. You know, I was a techie, so you got to have technical skills. you can grow them at, you know, at a university. I know, I know a couple of people, one, one person who I worked with at Bell Labs, and she did not have a higher education, which is extremely rare.
Ralph Severini: You know, at a place that requires PhDs and master's degrees. so it depends on the person. I also think detective skills and just plain old curiosity are, you know, essential to doing a job here because you're always kind of pick, you know, kind of hunting and pecking. So, I worked for an Israeli company at one time.
Ralph Severini: you know, I think Israel's got just a ton. I've even invested in one, in, in the security space, you know, I remember there was an IDF unit that specialized in this [00:10:00] area, and a couple of people I worked with, um, came out of that place.
Ralph Severini: A lot of smart people. Anyway, these are skills that, you know, Israel developed to protect and secure, you know, lives of millions of people. And, to me, that also goes a long way. So, you know, education, detective skills, um, just your innate curiosity and then countries like Israel that have built up that skill through, background of them protecting themselves.
Megan Garza: Yeah. You mentioned Israel. So actually, fun fact, um, Varonis means hero in Latvian.
Ralph Severini: I had no idea. Yeah, there's a great hotel in Herzliya that used to be on the beach called the Daniel. Um, what a great view outside of that. To go there just, you
Megan Garza: I, I want to go one day. I hope to go one day.
Megan Garza: what inspired your interest, uh, in the intersection kind of of insurance technology and cybersecurity?
Ralph Severini: you know, I, I mentioned Bell Labs and that's kind of where I started [00:11:00] from, on the tech side, so they invented the transistor, they had eight or nine Nobel Prize winners there, You know, that inspired me. I worked in a group, actually, that caught the first cyber criminal, Robert Morris. Do you recognize the Robert Morris worm? his father actually worked at the labs, and he was a grad student from, I think, Cornell, and he worked there one summer. He left the labs, and, and he created the first internet worm, and, you know, one of our groups, a group I was in, actually, nailed him.
Megan Garza: so he created the malicious worm and his father, his role was to protect.
Ralph Severini: His father, Mr. Morris, he was up in Murray Hill, which was the center of Bell Labs, and, um, you know, that's how he got his son to work there as a, you know, intern during the summer, and he was, he was one of the heads, his father was one of the heads of cybersecurity, so that was interesting
Megan Garza: [00:12:00] makes for an interesting, uh, family conversation.
Ralph Severini: And then, and yeah, so But anyway, on the insurance side, I got started as an underwriter, and then I underwrote Honda Motor Company, became an insurance broker, Broker. Um, I blame this all on my dad actually. He, uh, when I grew up in New Jersey, the two biggest employers were Prudential and bell Labs, so, or 50,000 people worked in New Jersey for either one of those and two, two employers. So I got a. Kind of got hit with both and, uh, but there's a lot of people who blame someone in their family when they joined insurance, but I kind of forged the two all the time.
Megan Garza: And I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I have to ask, if you weren't in cybersecurity, what would you be doing?
Ralph Severini: You know, my first major in college was, um, civil engineering. So, and even as a kid, I was always building, so I do enjoy, building and, uh, and, um, I been on three towns, um, planning commission. So I've spent a lot of time with [00:13:00] developers that I don't work for, so to speak. And you already mentioned, you already mentioned the jazz.
Megan Garza: Yeah.
Ralph Severini: You know, if it only made some money, it's a labor of love and truly a labor of artistic, you know, endeavors because it's, you know, all the money's made on the traditional rock side of the biz.
Ralph Severini: But, uh, yeah, uh, you know, one of those two or three things.
Megan Garza: Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Ralph. It was great chatting with you and catching up and seeing you. for being a part of Speed Data.
Ralph Severini: Yeah, and really nice chatting with you again and, uh, same here.