As Editorial Director of CSO ASEAN, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Bennett, Regional CTO of BT International, whose vast experience offers timely and pragmatic insights for our audience across Southeast Asia’s cybersecurity community. Andrew shared with me the lessons learned from his career journey, highlighting the importance of self-leadership, adaptability, and looking beyond one’s comfort zone to create business impact in digital environments. His perspective underscores the need to embed cybersecurity at the heart of transformation, ensuring that security is not simply layered on, but integrated from the outset to enable business agility and resilience. In our conversation, Andrew shared about the evolving complexity of threats, from ransomware to the next wave of AI-driven attacks and offered actionable guidance on moving away from fragmented, compliance-driven practices towards holistic risk management. He advocated for industry collaboration, talent cultivation, and robust enterprise architecture as foundational to securing distributed, hybrid, and cloud-enabled operations. As we concluded, Andrew urged CSOs to measure cyber investments by business value, champion a culture of continuous improvement, and embrace collective intelligence to anticipate the unknown to thrive in Southeast Asia’s dynamic and digital future.