Blogs

This week’s featured guest in our Women in Cybersecurity video series is Caroline Wong. Caroline is a book author who is active in the security community, sharing her experiences and learnings from her cybersecurity leadership roles at companies such as eBay and Zynga. She is the Chief Strategy Officer at Cobalt, a company that gives clients access to pen testers through their Pen Testing as a Service (PtaaS) platform. In her interview with ESG Sr. Analyst Melinda Marks, Caroline shares her experiences in her career in cybersecurity, as well as her advice around team culture and diversity in the workplace.

We’re excited to highlight Elizabeth Gossell for our second Women in Cybersecurity interview. Liz is the Principal Security Analyst for Danaher Corporation, a global science and technology conglomerate with subsidiaries operating across different market segments, including life sciences, diagnostics, and water. The company is no stranger to mergers and acquisitions, as it acquires roughly 10 companies each year. In this video interview, Liz speaks with ESG Sr. Analyst Melinda Marks about the evolving security challenges that come with M&A efforts, scaling, and sprawl, such as maintaining security consistency across all the organizations, and working quickly to secure new acquisitions.

"Timing is everything, in life and in golf… and in providing your customers with an ESG Validation” – Arnold Palmer (mostly)

There are a few ways to do a three-scoop ice cream order. You can commit to one flavor because it’s your favorite, it’s reliable, and you don’t like mixing flavors. You can get two scoops of your favorite flavor and one of a different flavor; this option allows you to stay loyal to your favorite flavor but also enjoy some variety. Or you can get all three different flavors, balancing the uniqueness of each, how they complement each other, and the different strengths and weaknesses they each have. Ok, maybe I’m looking a little too deeply into ice cream ordering, but this is how organizations are thinking when allocating workloads to cloud environments. While sticking to what they know may feel safer and more straightforward, sometimes the risk of mixing clouds (or flavors!) is worth the reward.

You’re driving down the highway, cruising at the speed limit (perhaps a bit over the speed limit), and then all of a sudden… traffic. It turns out there is construction up ahead and 3 lanes need to merge down to 1, causing a bottleneck of cars. While every car is capable of traveling the speed limit, there is simply not enough space for everyone to pass through the single lane while maintaining the speed they want to travel. When this happens, people feel like they are wasting time. In a similar way, when information reaches a bottleneck in a network, organizations may feel frustrated, knowing that there could be higher performance without the bottleneck. To combat this, many organizations have adopted Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology, and specifically NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), in order to open up more lanes for information travel. While typical NVMe is attached to the peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus, NVMe-oF gives organizations more flexibility and bandwidth to circumvent the traffic bottleneck and move more information, more quickly.

When April Fool’s Day comes around each year, it’s human nature to be a little more on-edge than usual. Your guard is up, and you can’t completely trust anyone (even your closest friends and family). So, for the whole day, you take extra precautions, carefully opening the present your friend just “wanted to drop by,” and not believing there’s “cake in the break room” until it’s fact checked. While it’s fun to dedicate one day per year to April Fool’s Day, organizations of all industries must take these precautions… every day of the year. Cyber criminals are looking for a way to break through security defenses 24/7/365, so organizations must also remain on the clock, working to protect their most critical assets. But when it comes to cyberattacks and protecting your data, the stakes are much higher than whether the cake in the break room is real or not.

There’s something so convenient about USPS Priority Mail. There are a few standard box sizes to choose from and each of them has a set fee, no matter what you put in the box. There’s no guessing as to how much the package will cost to ship, regardless of how much it weighs and how far it’s going, and your package gets to its destination in 1-3 business days, much faster than if you were to ship it normally. Many organizations are adopting container technology for similar reasons that we use USPS Priority Mail. Standardization makes operations easier for most, and improves speed and agility.

When you buy something online, a toaster for instance, do you simply find one in your price range and hit “order?” Or do you first look for third-party articles about which toasters are on the market (top rated, or those that include a specific feature you want)? You may also check to see which toasters have the highest customer ratings and read the reviews. From something as simple as a toaster, all the way up to a data center full of hyperconverged infrastructure, customers put trust in the opinions of those who don’t have stakes in the game. Independent third parties deliver the facts about product features and differentiation (why the customer should consider the product), and customer reviews provide raw, personal, and honest feedback about the product. Both are invaluable to customers that are trying to choose between several products in a saturated market.

You know those people who seem to have more than 24 hours in a day? They simultaneously balance work, hobbies, family, friends, and health (somehow). These “super humans” do it all. And although those aspects of life are separate entities, they still affect one another and must be managed concurrently. A desire to continuously “do more” creates challenges in our lives – it adds complexity and requires us to find new ways to become more efficient. Similarly, IT teams are tasked with doing more with the limited resources and budget they are provided - all in a world in which IT environments are becoming more and more complex. Organizations strive to increase operational efficiency and speed while minimizing costs and downtime; but this is no easy feat.

It can be easy to think, “That sounds horrible! But it probably won’t happen to me.” From getting into a fender bender, to spilling ketchup on your new white shirt, to… ransomware attacks. Believing ransomware attacks will only happen to “somebody else” can put your organization at a huge risk. On a much larger scale than buying car insurance or bringing an extra shirt, taking precautions against ransomware attacks can save your organization millions of dollars, as well as employee confidence, customer trust, and more.