Kaspersky's Stephan Neumeier bags the Executive of the Year for IT Services

Under his leadership, the cybersecurity company is set to build a transparency centre in Malaysia.

Stephan Neumeier, Managing Director for APAC at Kaspersky, received the Executive of the Year - IT Services at the recently concluded SBR Management Excellence Awards.

Under his leadership, Kaspersky in August announced the company’s Asia Pacific Transparency Center in Malaysia in line with the company’s Global Transparency Initiative: where partners and stakeholders can check the source code of Kaspersky’s solutions and learn more about its engineering and data processing practices.

At the new center, government regulators and enterprise clients of Kaspersky can request to review the company’s solutions and services, including threat analysis, secure review, and the application security testing process.

Stakeholders can also review all versions of Kaspersky’s builds and AV database updates, including any information that the company processes, such as data feeds from Kaspersky products that are sent to the cloud-based Kaspersky Security Network (KSN).

In partnership with CyberSecurity Malaysia, the announcement of the transparency center garnered media coverage from 125 media outlets across Asia Pacific.

Despite these achievements, Neumeier said that such changes are not without any resistance within the company. In June, the company had a rebranding activity where a new logo and visual identity was introduced.

Stephan made sure that employees fully understand the rebranding via several internal activities, encouraging employees to be advocates of the brand as well as communicating with channel partners during the transitional period.

“The physical change reflects a transformation in the way we think about our products, our approach to business and our vision of the future with the new mission of ‘building a safer world’ and bringing a new philosophy of digital security,” said Neumeier.

As part of the company’s efforts to boost cybersecurity education and nurture the next generation of talent, Kaspersky Labs forged a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Temasek Polytechnic (TP), Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

The cybersecurity company also introduced the Secur’IT Cup (held at the Singapore Institute of Technology), which Neumeier explained will provide a platform for students in Asia Pacific to engage in peer learning and get a headstart in networking with the company’s international experts in the industry.

The Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards was held on 26 November 2019 at the Conrad Centennial Singapore.

The 2019 nominees were judged by a panel consisting of Henry Tan, Group CEO & Chief Innovation Officer at NEXIA TS; David Chew, Executive Director, Risk Advisory at Deloitte Southeast Asia; Lim Wei Wei, Partner and Practice Leader, Governance and Risk at Baker Tilly TFW; Pardeep Singh Khosa, Director of Dispute Resolution at Drew & Napier; and Yang Eu Jin, Partner and Co Head of Capital Markets Practice at RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP.

If you would like to join the 2020 awards and be awarded as one of the most outstanding management executives of Singapore, please email [email protected]