by Matt Gardner, CEO, California Technology Council
If you've ever been around startup incubators and accelerators, you're familiar with the operational decisions every such facility makes with regard to BYOD, or bring-your-own-device. Cybersecurity professionals have gone past viewing a BYOD facility as a nightmare. It's now become the sort of thing that prompts a knowing laugh and nod.
A few nights ago, the CTC dined with former CIA chief technology officer Gus Hunt, now the proprietor of Hunt Technology (and a few dozen other friends). Mr. Hunt injected humor and realism into the dialogue in a manner that kept every guest engaged, regardless of technical qualifications.
Highlights over the course of the evening included the room full of laughter over the BYOD scenarios some had experienced. The conversation was wide-ranging, and essentially focused on the enterprise side of cyber-trends.
In the end, what seemed most noteworthy was the consensus of a sweeping need for integrated, enterprise-level approaches. Today's solutions seem to be cobbled together, not necessarily uniting operations, IT, telecoms, software, security and services. This represents a great challenge not only for rapid-growth users and consumers of such technology and service, but also for the vendors in general.
CTC company at dinner included Ali Golshan, Co-Founder and CTO of Cyphort, who has partnered with Mr. Hunt.
Golshan pointed out that it's common for a rapid-growth company to come to a point when it has to get its feet firmly planted on the ground. "The usual story is that a company reaches a point when it's bringing infrastructure into a unified approach for the first time after many years of ad hoc growth," he told the CTC. "This isn't a bad thing, it's just the way companies focus on growth until they can afford to put all those tools together."
Leaving dinner with Gus, one couldn't help but draw the conclusion that a generational investment in enterprise cybersecurity is coming for industry on the whole.
This also isn't a bad thing.