Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning (Part 1)

Inspired eLearning is doing something very effective in Cyber Security education. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a little bit of introduction to yourself as well as to the company.

Felix Odigie: I have a background in Computer Engineering. I went to Northeastern University and did my Masters at the Wharton School. The company I run is actually Inspired eLearning. We’re into security awareness and compliance e-learning space. We provide education for the enterprise.

To make that a little simpler for everyone, what we stumbled upon is, it became very difficult for hackers and network intruders to attack network infrastructure because there was a lot of investment in securing networks. The natural place for them to gravitate towards was to hack the individuals who are already inside infrastructure. That was easy. We are susceptible to phishing scams. That was our mission.

Our mission was to make the human being the firewall. Unfortunately given the human factor, you actually have to keep training on an active basis for that knowledge to stick. If you are more security-aware, you tend to be more resistant to those hack attempts. That was how Inspired eLearning was born. I came on board to take over the company several years ago. Fast forward and we are doing exceptionally well in the B2B software market and risk mitigation and compliance market.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a bit about who your target audience is. Are you we talking about the people designing cyber security policy? Are you talking about people who are implementing different cybers ecurity technologies? How exactly is your online learning program organized?

Felix Odigie: That’s a great question. Our target audience is everyone actually. However, the people that engage us are the CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs because they know the real issue. They are the ones in charge of the company’s security. They know that, no matter how secure the network is, it just takes that one email and it all comes down like a house of cards.

You heard of the Sony hack. You hear of all these big companies that come down to their knees because of an intrusion, unless the knowledge worker is aware of what to avoid. What we provide is a training program that teaches the employee how to be more aware of how these attacks look like. It’s actually quite adaptive to the individual. It’s e-learning which makes it affordable and easy. It is quite expensive to have instructors come on-site to train everybody because now you have to get everyone to leave their workplace to listen and learn. You can launch it from anywhere and it’s a short process. There’s a Compliance Officer who manages the program to ensure that everyone is taking it.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning
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