We're So Special Gartner Hasn't Even Thought Of Our Category Yet

This week’s episode is hosted by me, David Spark , producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson , CISO, Rivian . Our sponsored guest is Maxime Lamothe-Brassard , CEO and co-founder at LimaCharlie .

Is there a formula for a successful founder of a security startup? Ross Haleliuk of Venture in Security (and LimaCharlie) asked that very question and began investigating. He found the following patterns of successful startup founders:

• They have domain knowledge, credibility, and connections.
• They spend a substantial amount of time in their segment before starting a company.?
• They’re in their 40s or 50s starting their first security venture.
• They started as a security practitioner from a cloud-native venture-backed company.

Mike Johnson added another pattern is they are usually practitioners who saw the problem while working at another company. And often that company becomes an investor in their startup.?

What determines success with EDR? Is it the tool or the management of the tool? A heated debate on r/cybersecurity about which are the best and worst EDR tools resulted in one very popular response, “It’s more about how you manage the tool than the tool itself.” I've heard CISOs say you'd probably be OK with a lot of these vendors, just as long as you manage it properly. That puts much of the responsibility on the user, not the tool. For the top tier competitors, Mike Johnson agrees. As long as you make the commitment to manage them, you’ll probably be fine.

Are we in a never ending growth cycle of cybersecurity categories? Do you know which security categories were created this year? I have no idea. Do you know which ones were deleted? Is category growth designed to make more money for the industry? Does it help customers build a better security strategy? It seems like a necessary evil that just confuses customers. The number of categories never seems to go down or replace old categories.?

CISOs don’t want to add vendors, they want to consolidate and get rid of them. That’s the trend Gartner discovered a year ago in a survey that claimed 75% of organizations are pursuing security vendor consolidation. The survey added that a little more than half of organizations are working with fewer than 10 security vendors. Organizations primarily want to consolidate their security vendors to reduce complexity and improve risk posture, not to save on budget or to improve procurement. We see that number going higher and budgets being a bigger reason now given all the demands for cost cutting.

Listen to the full episode over on our blog, or your favorite podcast app where you can read the entire transcript. If you haven’t subscribed to CISO Series Podcast via your favorite podcast app, please go ahead and do so now.

Thanks to Jay Dance of StubHub for contributing this week’s What’s Worse scenario.

HUGE thanks to our sponsor, LimaCharlie

What I love about cyber security...

"I love that cyber security is such a new industry. It’s still so young. And there’s still so many ways that we’re going to learn how to do things, how to improve. It’s not a settled science. There’s so many opportunities and cool things that are going to be happening in the future." -?Maxime Lamothe-Brassard, CEO and co-founder, LimaCharlie

Finding Your Security Community...

"I think that having a good community can help you better understand what you need and how to focus on what you do. I think that creating a community if you have a good community of mentors makes everything more effective in your work and definitely helps you achieve your goals in a much better way. " -? Shahar Geiger Maor ,?CISO, Dario

Listen to full episode of "Finding Your Security Community."

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Cyber Security Headlines - Week in Review

Make sure you register on YouTube to join the LIVE "Week In Review" this Friday for Cyber Security Headlines with CISO Series reporter Richard Stroffolino . We do it this and every Friday at 3:30 PM ET/12:30 PM PT for a short 20-minute discussion of the week's cyber news. Our guest will be Dimitri van Zantvliet , CISO, NS (Dutch Railways).

Thanks to our Cyber Security Headlines sponsor, OpenVPN Inc.

Getting a Grasp on the Excitement and Fear of 5G - Super Cyber Friday

As we’re watching the onboarding of 5G there’s a lot of excitement of the possibilities, but for security professionals it seems like it’s going to to be a daunting task as the number of endpoints to monitor will shoot up dramatically. In the video, I interview? Kevin McNamee , security product manager,? 诺基亚 ?about the benefits and the oncoming concerns of 5G.

It’s all a tease for a live event we’re holding on July 21st, 2023 on Super Cyber Friday. Our topic of discussion will be “Hacking 5G Security: An hour of critical thinking about the looming explosion of IoT on 5G networks.”

>>?Register for the event happening on 07-21-23?<<

Joining me and Kevin for this discussion will be? Howard Holton , CTO and industry analyst,? GigaOm .

It all starts at 1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific. At the end of the hour [2 PM Eastern/11 AM Pacific] we’ll switch gears to our meetup where everyone will get a chance to chat face to face.

Thanks to our Super Cyber Friday sponsor, 诺基亚

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