Key takeaways from the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2024

The Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, held in June 2024 in National Harbor, MD, was a whirlwind of insights, strategies, and discussions surrounding the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity. Having attended numerous sessions and even led one of my own, I’m excited to share the highlights and key takeaways that resonated most with me.

From left to right: Jey N, Kathleen Kessler, El Ezzekmi in the Eviden booth
at Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2024

 

Themes that shaped the summit

  • The evolving threat landscape: Sessions like ‘Growing Your SOC with Purpose, Not Impulse’ painted a vivid picture of a threat landscape that is constantly changing and becoming increasingly sophisticated. It’s clear that organizations must adopt a proactive and adaptive security posture to stay ahead of malicious actors.
  • Generative AI and security: Generative AI (GenAI) was a major focus point. Multiple sessions like ‘Generative AI and the SOC: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ delved into both the opportunities and the risks it presents for security. While it holds immense potential to transform security operations, organizations must be aware of the unique challenges it introduces and the type of strategies that they need to develop to mitigate potential misuse.
  • Security and risk management convergence: The growing convergence between security and risk management disciplines was highlighted in the sessions, ‘Top Trends for Cybersecurity 2024’, which emphasized the need for a holistic approach to security. This would account for not just technical vulnerabilities, but broader business risks, too.
  • Identity-first security: The importance of identity-centric security models was evident throughout the summit. The prevalence of sessions like ‘Outlook for Identity and Access Management 2024’ underscored the need to establish strong identity verification and access controls in today’s distributed work environments.

We saw that generative AI, cyber mesh architecture (CSMA), IAM, and cloud security were the recurring trends across these themes.

 

Our session with AWS: Elevating cyber resilience

In line with the summit’s theme of cyber resilience, we had the privilege of presenting alongside our partner, AWS, on a topic that’s keeping many security professionals up at night: the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats.

Harshvardhan Parmar presenting at Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2024

Although businesses and governments around the world understand the gravity and need to stay ahead of attackers, traditional security measures are struggling to keep pace with the complexity and sophistication of modern attacks. The team of AWS and Eviden experts took to the stage to discuss how organizations can effectively evolve their security operations. We also illustrated how Cyber Mesh and AI act as the primary building blocks of such an evolved solution.

 

Resonating challenges

Unsurprisingly, our audience resonated with the challenges we highlighted. However, they were unsure of how to translate the idea into a reality. Some of the concerns that were highlighted were as follows:

  • How do we achieve/build this Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA)?
  • What happens to my existing investments if I migrate to CSMA?
  • How much will this cost?

Most organizations lack the expertise and resources needed to effectively adopt CSMA and AI, not to mention the cost associated with this adoption. Here’s where we were able to change the conversation and demonstrate why Eviden is an industry leader.

 

Presenting a solution: AIsaac Cyber Mesh, a next-gen MDR solution

As pioneers and early adopters of CSMA, Eviden leverages Amazon Security Lake to amplify security outcomes for our customers. We do this by unifying data silos of security tools into an integrated end-to-end digital security ecosystem.

The result is Eviden’s AIsaac Cyber Mesh that has been developed in partnership with AWS. This is a simplified single central console that brings together threat intelligence, security data, logs, alerts, flows, vulnerabilities and configuration changes in one place for analysis and actionable insights to improve threat detection and enable informed security decisions.

Our co-speaker Jason Perry, Sr. Solution Architect, AWS also added:

The round-table discussion was a fantastic opportunity to dive deep into the latest trends and challenges in cybersecurity mesh architectures. The insights shared by the other industry experts, including CIOs and CISOs, were invaluable. I was surprised to learn that many of them were not yet aware of the Cyber Security Mesh Architecture (CSMA) or the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF).

This just goes to show that Eviden is truly on the cutting edge, delivering innovative cybersecurity solutions to its clients. And the level of interest and engagement we saw from clients around our AIsaac Cyber Mesh solution was incredibly encouraging. It’s clear that there is a growing demand for unified security platforms that can help organizations overcome the challenges of data fragmentation and visibility.”

 

A learning experience for all

The discussion was an enriching one for our audience, as well as for us. Here are some key takeaways from our session:

  1. Enhancing cyber resilience with Cyber Mesh: Gartner defines Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA) as “a collaborative ecosystem of tools and controls to secure a modern, distributed enterprise.” By redefining the perimeter to protect extended, interconnected systems, CSMA improves the overall security posture and strengthens an organization’s ability to detect and respond to cybersecurity threats.
  2. AI: A force multiplier: AI can revolutionize how organizations detect, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks. Processing large datasets to provide actionable insights, predictive analysis, automating detection and response, and improving accuracy are some ways in which AI can optimize security operations.
  3. Integration of AI and Cyber Mesh for optimal protection: The integration of AI with Cyber Mesh creates a highly adaptive and resilient security posture. AI’s analytical capabilities combined with Cyber Mesh’s robust architecture can significantly improve an organization’s security.

The way ahead is a promising one, but the key lies in how quickly organizations adopt CSMA and AI.

 

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