A big part of Alfred Spector's job is to think about the future.
Spector, the chief technology officer at Two Sigma and head of engineering, runs a team of 600 engineers at the $60 billion hedge fund and has to balance expanding into the latest and greatest tech innovations with protecting the precious algorithms and data that have made Two Sigma one of the biggest hedge funds in the world.
While the firm has moved massive amounts of its operations into Google's cloud computing system, Spector said in an interview with Business Insider that he still spent a lot of time thinking about security — including the biggest of threats: cybersecurity attacks by "nation-states."
"I think there needs to be an understood security-risk model, just as citizens, that explains what are acts of war and how it applies to these type of attacks," Spector said.
"That's something people like me worry about — we are clearly a network-based business."
A onetime academic and senior executive at IBM and Google, Spector says that clients are not yet worried about this risk to the business but that it's part of his role to do so.
"If there were an outright attack on US infrastructure, I don't think I could resist that," he said.
"Whether anyone can resist those attacks, whether it's Google or anyone else, I think it's an interesting question."
Chief technology and chief information officers in any industry are always thinking about security. A study by CIO magazine at the beginning of the year found that CIOs were spending roughly half of their time on security management, and 40% said it was the reason IT spending had increased at their organization.
Google, which provides the cloud services that Two Sigma uses, has several suboceanic cables connecting its global data centers powering the cloud technology, and Spector said he almost asked whether the company had a submarine fleet to protect them.
"It would be very hard to believe that a nation-state that wanted to look at the US financial system doesn't know where all those cables are," he said. Google's head of financials services for its cloud business, Ulku Rowe, told Business Insider that the underwater cables, which are clad in armor, were occasionally attacked by sharks.
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Two Sigma, run by the billionaire D.E. Shaw alums John Overdeck and David Siegel, invests a third or more of its tech budget into future developments, with the rest going to day-to-day operations.
"We are way more on the invest-in-the-future side than probably the very large financial institutions, which somehow seem to not be able to do that," Spector said.
Still, while he said financial firms were being "very, very careful," Spector called security a harder problem to solve than artificial intelligence.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said.
