Balancing Ethical Cybersecurity and Innovation: ManageEngine’s Approach to Trust-Driven Security Practices

In the face of escalating ransomware attacks such as Akira and Ryuk, the global cybersecurity industry has found itself at a crossroads, with a traditional instinct to fortify defenses and institute more aggressive automated responses. However, a new challenge has emerged, as highlighted by Romanus Prabhu Raymond, Director of Technology at ManageEngine.

Organizations are demanding robust containment measures, yet overly aggressive actions could potentially cause more harm than the initial threat, particularly in sensitive sectors such as hospitals and banks. This delicate balancing act between rapid response and real-world consequences underscores the importance of ethical cybersecurity practices in 2025.

In an exclusive pre-Cyber Security Expo interview, Raymond discussed how leading organizations are navigating beyond the traditional security-versus-privacy trade-off and embracing a “trust revolution” that could redefine enterprise security.

The cybersecurity landscape has reached a critical juncture, with high-profile breaches, evolving regulations, and AI integration creating challenges that extend far beyond technical protection. Organizations now grapple with questions of innovation versus responsibility, privacy versus security, and automation versus human oversight.

According to Raymond, ethical cybersecurity transcends traditional defensive strategies. “Ethical cybersecurity encompasses more than just securing systems and data; it involves applying security practices responsibly to protect organizations, individuals, and society at large,” he explained in our interview preceding his Cyber Security Expo presentation titled “The Ethical Imperative: Balancing Risk, Innovation, and Responsibility.”

In the cloud-first environment of 2025, security is no longer a competitive differentiator but a baseline expectation. What sets organizations apart is their ethical handling of data and implementation of security measures.

Raymond uses the analogy of community surveillance cameras that safeguard public spaces while respecting private areas to illustrate this philosophy. Cybersecurity should operate under similar principles.

ManageEngine has embodied this ethos through an “ethical by design” approach, integrating fairness, transparency, and accountability into every product from inception. The company’s stance on customer data exemplifies this commitment: it neither commodifies nor monitors customer data, considering it the sole property of the customer.

The tension between innovation and risk management presents a significant challenge for modern organizations. Pursuing innovation without adequate safeguards could lead to data breaches and regulatory violations, while overemphasizing risk mitigation may hinder competitiveness in evolving markets.

ManageEngine’s “trust by design” philosophy embeds responsibility and accountability into every development stage, allowing for rapid innovation while maintaining compliance and ethical standards. For instance, when deploying critical components like endpoint agents, the company ensures new functionality inherently complies with industry standards and security requirements.

This approach extends globally. ManageEngine maintains datacenters worldwide that align with local privacy and regulatory demands, and trains every employee – from developers to support engineers – to treat customer data with integrity. The company’s “trans-localisation strategy” ensures local teams serve local customers, fostering operational efficiency and cultural trust.

As AI becomes increasingly central to cybersecurity operations, the ethical implications of AI-driven security solutions have become more complex. Raymond acknowledges that AI is evolving from supportive roles to more decisive functions, raising questions about accountability, transparency, and fairness.

Raymond introduces ManageEngine’s “SHE AI principles”: Secure AI, Human AI, and Ethical AI. Secure AI involves building robust protections against manipulation and adversarial attacks. Human AI ensures human oversight remains integral to critical security actions. For example, if AI detects a suspicious endpoint, it escalates for human validation rather than automatically removing the device from the network.

This is particularly important in sensitive environments like hospitals or banks, where automatically blocking systems could have severe consequences.

The Ethical AI component emphasizes explainability. Rather than generating opaque alerts, ManageEngine’s systems explain their reasoning. An alert might read: “The endpoint cannot log in at this time and is trying to connect to too many network devices.” This transparency is essential for compliance and building trust in AI-driven security systems.

The balance between necessary security monitoring and privacy invasion represents one of the most delicate aspects of ethical cybersecurity practices. Raymond acknowledges that while proactive monitoring is crucial for early threat detection, over-monitoring risks creating a surveillance environment that treats employees as suspects rather than trusted partners.

ManageEngine employs principles that emphasize data minimization, purpose-driven monitoring, anonymization, and clear governance structures. The company collects only the necessary information for security purposes, ensures every piece of data has a defined security use case, uses anonymized data for pattern analysis, and defines data access privileges and retention periods.

The framework demonstrates that security and privacy need not be mutually exclusive when guided by ethics, transparency, and accountability.

Raymond contends that technology vendors must function as custodians of digital ethics, earning trust rather than expecting it blindly. ManageEngine claims it contributes to industry standards by engaging in thought leadership, advocacy, and embedding compliance standards like ISO 27000 and GDPR into products from the outset.

Raymond identifies AI-driven autonomous security and quantum computing as the biggest ethical challenges facing the industry. As security operations centers move toward full autonomy, questions of explainability and accountability become critical. Quantum computing’s ability to break traditional encryption threatens secure communication foundations, while technologies like biometrics raise privacy concerns if not managed carefully.

For organizations seeking to integrate ethical considerations into their cybersecurity strategies, Raymond recommends three practical steps: adopting a cybersecurity ethics charter at the board level, embedding privacy and ethics in technology decisions when selecting vendors, and operationalizing ethics through comprehensive training and controls that explain not just what to do, but why it matters.

As the cybersecurity landscape evolves, companies that will thrive are those that recognize ethical cybersecurity practices as the foundation for sustainable, trusted technological advancement, not as constraints on innovation. In the future, organizations must innovate responsibly and maintain human oversight and the ethical principles that digital trust requires.