Seth, I would like to kind of share a little bit of a of an experience that I had just two weeks ago.That was about the same time that Anna reached out with this wonderful opportunity for me to speak to all the wonderful women on this forum. The experience that I had was, I would say, a very strange one. And the reason I call it strange is I was actually getting ready to be interviewed by a journalist. We walk into the room, perfunctory hellos, sit down, two to three minutes pass by, and there was radio silence. At a certain point in time, I wasn't really sure what was going on.

I looked a little further to know what exactly did this journalist want to know from me. What was he looking for to get out of the interview? It was a scheduled one, by the way. So he decides to dive in, and he says he wants to hear more about the cyber resilience industry and how businesses are thinking about it from mister Vidya. That's when it hit me. And I said, guess what? Hello? I'm I'm miss Vidya. When he was understandably mortified, embarrassed, apologized profusely, and also acknowledged the unconscious bias that that we all inherently carry, that somehow the cybersecurity and the cyber resilience domain in itself is male centric. It's something that men typically excel at. Now here's the short, distinction. Right? I've been in this, cyber resilience space for almost a decade now.

I do see a lot of women, but not enough women in the room. So when I say that we need to have more women, there's a reason behind it too. And that's exactly what I want to bring to the forefront here when I when I say that women are a natural fit when we talk about overall resilience, cyber resilience. So when I talk to our customers across the globe, the the the typical strategies that we help them craft is cyber resilience. What how how can businesses recover in the face of a cyber attack? It basically boils down to making sure that you're able to detect, protect, and recover. So who best than a woman to actually embody all that resilience? Because what a woman brings naturally to the table, naturally to any conversation, is anticipation, protection, and stability.

So women are naturally blessed with a with a very strong sense of intuition. They listen to their gut. We pick up on even the weak signals and amplify it. This we do on a daily basis, almost subconsciously. Now applying that same principle to cyber resilience is a no brainer. It's it's a it's the most natural thing for women to do and adopt and apply at their jobs. Now the most important aspect of it is that healthy sense of, paranoia, healthy sense of skepticism is also what makes a woman that much more integral when it comes to building a cyber resilience strategy. Those weak signals that I talked about, that is the gut telling her exactly what needs to be done, not just when it comes to the safety of her own self or her families or her friends, her ecosystem, but also the business that she is in charge of. So the other thing that typically comes up all the time is, you know, how do you how do you go about building this healthy sense of paranoia?

Now something that even martial arts as such actually advocates for all the time is making sure that you're watching for those signals in and around you, making sure you're able to anticipate where that threat vector is coming from. How do you anticipate failure modes even before they occur? This is something that world calls that we are worrywarts, but this is something that I've heard a gazillion times in my career, even on the personal side. But that is sophisticated threat modeling. That is planning for backups and resilience. That is accounting for human layer of resilience. Something that Abid also talked about is accounting for the people around you. Pay attention to those. That comes naturally to women. When you bring together the ecosystem that supports you, automatically you support them. It's it's a it's a symbiotic relationship that we have with the ecosystem.

And the most important piece, which is around the healthy skepticism that I talk about, in fact, there's an emerging trend that when it comes to socially engineered cyberattacks, women are actually less susceptible to it because the healthy sense of skepticism actually forces them to constantly verify and trust the parameters that are probably building an artificial sense of urgency, so they are now questioning everything.

Question every every parameter that's that gets thrown at you. Now this is an important tenant even when it comes to cybersecurity. Anytime there's an artificial sense of urgency that is being created, you would want to take a step back and understand what is building up to that sense of urgency. That questioning, which comes again very naturally to women, is exactly what is instrumental in preventing cascading failures within businesses, which in my mind is the most straightforward intuitive thing that, comes to women, and that makes them a natural fit in terms of cybersecurity strategies, in terms of building out cyber resilience strategies, and that inherent sense of curiosity, making sure that you're taking those cautious next steps automatically four to five businesses today.

So one of the other interesting things that keeps coming up is I know I talk about all big things here, how we should be doing certain things, but it's not that easy. I continue to be the only woman in several rooms and I want to see the numbers increase. Something that Elaine brought up as well and I it completely resonated, very well with me is to not self disqualify. There are a gazillion parameters out there that's already working against us. We should we should be getting out of our own ways. And I'm saying I'm superhuman. I'm definitely not. There are days, there are times when it feels pretty dire. It feels frustrating. It feels challenging. I have had the temptations to throw in the proverbial towel.

But I know that if I were to give up now in this moment, I'm actually showing my daughter that it is okay to give up. It is not. I'm not leaving the world in a better place if I give up, not just for my daughter, but for all our daughters. And, again, perseverance is key. And that is where this sisterhood that we are building collectively is critical, is pivotal, and this is literally the lifeline that we will all come to depend on. I know this is not a very long expanded conversation, per se, but I want to leave this audience with this fantastic golden nugget that I found on social media. And this is a very powerful quote from private practice. This resonated so deeply with me. I actually have it downloaded. I go back to this video every few minutes. I'm sorry. Let me bring that up. Where did you find the strength? We're women, honey. The strength finds us.

So this is a constant reminder to myself not to give up because the task ahead of us is not easy, but it's not impossible. So with that, feel free to reach out, feel free to connect, feel free to network, because the end goal is to lift as we climb. Thank you.