ESG Blogs

This week I flew to Nashville, TN to participate in ExtremeConnect 22 customer event. Despite Covid flare ups here and there, this event was very well attended – in fact it was sold out.

This was my second in-person event of 2022 and it is great to be back, as everyone gets so much more out of these events when together, and not just the ability to attend keynotes to feel the energy in the room, but the ability to attend training sessions, the opportunity for impromptu hallway meetings, getting access to executives and engineering talent, and the ability to interact socially with your peers.

Forgive me for the blatant cheesiness of the title, but in this case, using the term hacking is sort of relevant…bear with me…

No doubt that working in cybersecurity is really THE thing to do right now. The opportunities seem endless. But exactly what paths can you pursue when entering a field that is constantly evolving?

This episode of Women in Cybersecurity showcases Brittany Greenfield, the founder and CEO of Wabbi. While Brittany started her career with a degree in biotechnology, working in business process and marketing roles, she turned her focus to cybersecurity, knowing how critical it is in the fabric of technology. Today she leads a company integrating security into software development. Check out our video below, and be sure to check out the full audio interview.

ESG's annual technology spending intentions report for 2022 surveyed 706 senior IT decision-makers at midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations across North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific. From an overall perspective, the good news is that 62% of organizations plan to increase overall IT spending. As part of that research, respondents with purchasing influence or authority for networking products and services were asked about their organization’s spending plans in this area over the next 12 months. The data indicates that 52% are expected to maintain the prior year's budget levels and 43% will increase spending. Only 5% will shrink their networking budget.

In the wake of the 4th annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) user conference, AWS has finally emerged as a leader in cloud infrastructure and platform services. AWS now has over 1 million active customers and year-over-year growth in EC2 instances, data transfer, and database use that is close to 100% as of 2015 Q2. AWS did $4.6 billion in revenue in 2014 and expects to see $7.3 billion by the end of 2015 which is close to 60% growth. Amazon is now adding over $1 billion in new revenue per quarter. It’s rare to see these kinds of growth rates in a business that is closing in on 10 years old. This shows the transformative effect that cloud services are having on the IT business.

I am at VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas this week attending the event in person. I had the great opportunity to spend time with a few key executives from Veeam and discuss their latest release and plans for the future.

My colleague Rob Stretchay completed research on the challenges organizations face as their applications become more distributed across clouds. In this video, we discuss some of his findings, including how developers are spending their time – including their time remediating security issues. This is interesting to me because we've been talking about developer workflows and whether developers can take on some security processes. Developers want to focus on building software, but they care about quality, reliability, and they don’t want to waste time doing rework. Check out the video to hear us discuss the opportunity for security solutions to help.

This week I'm pleased to share my interview with Sharon Goldberg, the cofounder and CEO of BastionZero. She is also a computer science professor at Boston University. Check out our video below, and listen to the full audio interview.

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.

Cloud adoption is ubiquitous, and many organizations have adopted a cloud-first deployment policy. However, organizations continue to use on-premises infrastructure. Thus, the new normal IT infrastructure is hybrid multi-cloud. In such an environment, the perimeter becomes amorphous and dynamic, changing rapidly as organizations spin up new applications.