It feels like only yesterday when we first heard about SASE. The proposition of consuming network and security services from the cloud was attractive and resonated with the market. It’s no surprise that internet service providers (ISPs) started exploring how they could offer a set of SASE services. Fast forward to today and we all are watching how Security Service Edge (SSE) as a new product category is being received by enterprises.

While the C-suite is becoming increasingly aware of the threats bad cyber actors pose, many still harbour an antiquated impression of cybercriminals. We imagine hooded “hackers”, working alone in a basement, and of course, the stock image that accompanies the vast majority of media articles about cyber attacks depicts just this.

At the end of March 2022, two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-22963 and CVE-2022-22965) were discovered in different components of VMware Spring. Spring is a popular framework focused on facilitating the development of Java applications, including cloud-based apps, eliminating the need for additional code or concerns related to server requirements.

A new cloud phishing campaign is abusing Microsoft Azure’s Static Web Apps service to steal credentials from multiple services including Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail.

We have built a Security Operations Center at Netskope in short order. Facing the vast expanse of the Security Operations ocean, I grabbed my board with my team and focused on doing a few things really well. We documented workflows, expanded our visibility, and tuned monitoring systems. We paddled out from shore, braving the shark-infested waters of the threat landscape.

When cloud first emerged as a new operational model for IT, its low total cost of ownership (TCO) was a topline selling point. Yet today, when considering moving security into the cloud, many worry that it will drive up costs, or at the very least demand an upfront investment that will be hard to justify in the mid-term. The reality is that cloud-native Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities deliver a strong return of investment (ROI) with a low TCO.

The security community took a step backward last week in our ability to deal with the crisis involving Okta. Instead of exercising well-thought-out and practiced contingency plans to objectively assess risk, many individuals took a trolling posture on social media. The reaction was neither professional nor conducive to our mission as defenders against threat actors seeking to do us harm.

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the Davood for Thought podcast. The host, Davood Ghods, is Vice President of Government Solutions at Direct Technology, so it was both enlightening and enjoyable to share insights with him. We discussed how we as an industry need to pursue innovation to solve real-world problems, as opposed to pursuing innovation for the sake of innovation.

In the business of security, linking performance metrics to strategy has become an accepted best practice. If strategy is the blueprint for building a security operations center (SOC), metrics are the raw materials. But there is a catch: a security organization can easily lose sight of its strategy and instead focus strictly on the metrics that are meant to represent it.

I’m not big on acronyms or buzzwords. Like many executives, my eyes glaze over when I’m being prospected with an alphabet soup of technology terms I supposedly “need” to care about. So why, then, does the title of this article include Security Service Edge (SSE), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and Zero Trust? Despite our justified disdain for acronyms, the ideas behind these terms hold genuine importance for business leaders.