The Gartner® Security and Risk Management Summit brought together many of the most well-respected thought leaders in cybersecurity from around the world. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn about the latest trends, challenges, and solutions impacting our industry. For CISOs, CEOs, board members, security professionals, and more, it highlighted best practices for dealing with current cyber threats as well as how to develop strategies that protect data while enabling progress. For those who couldn’t join us in person at National Harbor, Maryland, here are our takeaways:

1. Addressing The Future of Security Defense in Depth with Cybersecurity Mesh

At this year’s summit, Cybersecurity Mesh emerged as a game-changing innovation in security architecture. With its distributed approach, Cybersecurity Mesh offers unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and reliability in cybersecurity control. Gartner’s VP Analyst, Patrick Hevesi, discussed revolutionary technologies like AI, augmented reality, and blockchain and their role in advancing security defense in depth. With the ability to make automatic and predictive dynamic security decisions, these technologies are critical for staying ahead of advanced attacks. CSMA 2.0 was also unveiled, providing exciting new information.

Gartner VP Analyst Patric Hevesi showing SafeGPT in the CSMA session.

This was the session that made all the difference for us. We were so privileged that Patrick demoed SafeGPT, our generative AI chat interface, to show how easy SafeGPT made getting pressing answers such as:

  • What are the top cyber risks for my organization?
  • How likely are we to be breached by a particular zero-day threat?
  • What can we do to improve our risk posture?

2. Minimum Effective: Adopting A Deliberate, ROI-Driven Mindset

The 2023 event commenced with Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, Henrique Teixeira, introducing the “minimum effective” mindset as a significant shift in leadership’s approach to cybersecurity ROI. According to Teixeira, many CISOs experience burnout and lack control over their workload and work-life balance. While cybersecurity teams exert maximum effort, their impact remains suboptimal.

To address this issue, we recommend that CISOs prioritize automation and simplification when selecting cybersecurity products. For instance, Safe’s Cyber Risk Management platform automates data ingestion through API integration and collaboration with 50+ ecosystem partners. Our latest integration with WIZ enables mutual customers to automate and consolidate enterprise-wide risk across your entire attack surface in a single platform. We prioritize simplification above all else. We aim to make every aspect of our service easy to use – from our user-friendly dashboards to automated data collection and rapid product deployment, everything is designed with simplification in mind.

Yinon C. Co-founder, Wiz & Saket B, CPO, Safe Security, excited about the joint Integration

3. CISOs’ role will be elevated with the new SEC guidelines

At this year’s Summit, we saw strong evidence that the industry is finally shifting away from a compliance mindset and thinking more about external risk management, risk detection, and risk reduction, especially with the proposed SEC guidelines that will increase executive accountability for cyber risk oversight. This means that executives will need to stay on top of cybersecurity best practices and ensure their companies are taking appropriate measures to mitigate potential cyber risks.

Michael Johnson, CISO & Gartner Board Member, and Saket Modi, CEO of Safe, presenting at the Gartner Summit

Our session at Gartner addressing how “AI-driven CRQ helps with Executive-Level SEC Accountability” was packed. Our speakers shared best practices and actionable insights to help executives develop better strategies for mitigating cyber threats and accurately gauge the effectiveness of risk reduction initiatives while complying with SEC guidance. Michael Johnson, CISO, and a Gartner Research board member talked about best practices and questions CISOs should consider.

  1. How organizations need to manage Cyber Risk and Governance in a transparent and trustworthy manner.
    • Is the Risk Model an open model or a black box?
    • Is the Model data-driven or subjective to manual interpretation?
    • Can the Model be extended and shared with regulators, if needed?
  2. How organizations need to have a holistic strategy around board oversight.
    • How is the board informed about cyber risks?
    • How often does the board convene to talk about cyber risks? How can they get a clear picture of the organization’s risk?
    • How does the board think about cyber risks regarding the company’s business strategy?

The Gartner® Security and Risk Management Summit offered invaluable insights and takeaways for attendees. From the importance of a minimum effective mindset to Generative AI use cases and getting people to care about risk, attendees were empowered with the knowledge and tools to strengthen their security posture.

To learn more about how Safe Security can help predict and prevent breaches and reduce risk, schedule a demo with a cyber risk expert, or write to us at [email protected].

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