ESG Blogs

ESG recently completed a research survey of 400 cybersecurity and IT professionals working at small organizations (i.e., 50 to 499 employees) in North America. As you can imagine, these firms tend to have a small staff responsible for cybersecurity and IT, reporting to business management rather than CIOs or CISOs.

I’m not sure how many people attended Black Hat in Las Vegas last week, but it surely felt like a record crowd. Optimistic attendees lauded the show for its threat research and focus on cybersecurity skills while skeptics bemoaned Black Hat changes, disparagingly referring to the show as ‘RSA in the desert.’

As for yours truly, my week was educational, albeit exhausting. I started early by participating in the CISO Summit on Tuesday where I hosted a panel on AI and machine learning in cybersecurity. My week ended with a Thursday dinner brainstorming session on cybersecurity operations. There were dozens of formal and informal meetings in between. 

Last week, Cisco jumped head first into the identity and access management (IAM) market with its acquisition of Duo Security for over $2.3 billion. Now, I’ve been chatting with Cisco about identity management for many years. Cisco always understood the importance of identity management in the security stack but remained reluctant to jump into this area. 

I’m about to leave New England and brave temperatures of 110 degrees or above. It may sound crazy, but I’m actually looking forward to the trip next week. Why? I’m heading to Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, and I’m excited to learn more about:

1. Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. I am hosting a panel at the CISO Summit titled, The Real Impact of AI on Cybersecurity. As part of this panel discussion, we will cut through the industry hype around AI/ML and talk about how real enterprise organizations are using and benefiting from the technology. It should be a fruitful and enlightening discussion.

I attended my first Google Next conference last week in San Francisco and came away quite impressed. Clearly, Google is throwing more of its engineering prowess and financial resources at GCP to grab a share of enterprise cloud computing dough and plans to differentiate itself based upon comprehensive enterprise-class cybersecurity features/functionality.

Earlier this week Rubrik announced the launch of a new addition to the Polaris SaaS platform: Polaris Radar. This new application focuses on the mitigation of data security incidents with ransomware squarely in its sights.  

In our 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, ESG identified that ransomware is on the rise and represents a concern for both business and IT leaders. Ransomware has become very pervasive and the majority of firms ESG surveyed reported experiencing ransomware last year, generating a high level of concern, with 81% of organizations reporting to be either concerned or highly concerned about ransomware.

The CISO role has evolved over the past few years from tactical IT manager to strategic business executive. Given this transition, what qualities are most important for making CISOs successful?

To answer this question, I went back to the data from last year’s research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). I then cut the data by respondents' role to understand what CISOs think is most important. 

Last week, I attended Tufin’s annual customer conference, Tufinnovate, here in Boston. If you don’t know Tufin, the company focuses on network security policy management for enterprise organizations.

This discussion with Doug Cahill, part of ESG's 360 Video series, covers the changing nature of cybersecurity threats across generations. As Doug makes clear, it’s not just the point and complexity of attacks that has changed, but their nature has too - both in terms of the perpetrators and their motivations. From the earliest generation of “nuisance” attacks on PCs, via application and operational disturbances as the Internet grew, and through to the systemic, malicious, and often monetarily motivated modern generation of attacks (that now includes 'crypto-jacking' and even state-sponsored actions), the threat landscape has become increasingly complex. The situation is even more challenging as the various generations and styles of threat do not supercede each other but are accretive and all continue today. This means that defense in depth and prevention are the watchwords for today; and this helps explain the rise of cybersecurity 'umbrella' platforms rather than simply an ever-increasing number of point products. It is a serious situation, but not without hope!

Venture capital investments in cybersecurity companies are aggressive these days but yesterday’s news was startling nonetheless. First, Cylance announced a round of $120 million led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities. Cylance says that the funding will help it expand sales and marketing initiatives and extend its global footprint.