2024: Converting Challenges to Opportunities

As I reflect on 2024, I never could have anticipated what the year ahead would bring. The challenge of a threat actor attacking close to home tested us in various ways, staying focused, humble, and using the situation to innovate helped us ensure that we stayed on?mission through the entire year. This year more people went to vote around the world, with the largest democracies heading to elections and cyber security had a key role in?ensuring democracy was not threatened. We had some of the largest sporting events and our incident responders had to ensure that the hope and camaraderie that the games bring were not dampened by threat actors.? Helping enterprises and governments stay prepared and continue to make new progress in the face of security threats while we defended attacks against our home tested our mettle and made us all stronger. ?

The upside to this relentless pressure was that it revealed our potential to innovate. Like a diamond, some of the greatest innovations shine brightest when forged under the greatest pressure, leading us to end the year with some remarkable new security offerings. We introduced two of these, Microsoft Security Exposure Management and Sentinel graph, at our Ignite Conference. ?These solutions bring fresh new ways to help people evaluate their security and progressively get more proactive and possibly predictive, marking the next step in the cybersecurity evolution. ?

The other amazing thing this year was us forging stronger communities, some of them?resulting from the joint challenges we all faced. These communities?shared and collaborated in collective growth of the security community. We did that on so many fronts, with new technology partnerships, with customers across the globe, across teams at various partners and my favorite one was the community of women CISOs we’ve started building with the goal to be there for each other while also empowering the next generation of new female security leaders. All these communities continue to show that we are stronger, more resourceful and resilient together. ?

Looking back at the year, the friendships forged, the strides made in security innovation and the continued clarity of the mission to help everyone achieve their dreams by making their environment safer make me truly optimistic about the year to come. Wishing everyone an inspired and hope filled holiday season. ?