We’re thrilled to share that Business Intelligence Group has named WatchGuard as a winner in the Organizational Excellence category and recognized WatchGuard CEO Prakash Panjwani with a prestigious Leadership Award at this year’s Fortress Cyber Security Awards! This annual program recognizes the top companies, executives, and products from around the world leading the charge in preparing, defending and responding to growing cybersecurity threats.

Today, we are proud to share the exciting news around WatchGuard CEO Prakash Panjwani’s big win at the annual Tech Ascension Leadership Awards – taking home the program’s prestigious “CEO of the Year” title for 2023! The Tech Ascension Awards program recognizes the top technology companies and leaders driving cutting-edge, innovative solutions to solve critical challenges in their respective markets.

XDR (eXtended Detection and Response) is a leading integrated cybersecurity approach, which improves threat detection and response through integrating multiple data sources and cybersecurity tools and unifying multiple security products into a single operating system. XDR technology is growing increasingly popular. And it’s an opportunity for managed service providers (MSPs) to scale and grow their business.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of WatchGuard Advanced EPDR as part of our Unified Security Platform® architecture. Now available in WatchGuard’s distribution channels, WatchGuard Advanced EPDR is tightly integrated within WatchGuard Cloud and ThreatSync, delivering valuable visibility and intelligence while fortifying cross-product detection and response.

A vulnerability is a software code error that hackers can use to gain direct access to an IT system. "Exposure" is an incident in which a previously detected weakness has been taken advantage of by an unauthorized actor in the network. Recent research suggests that only 2% of all exposures give attackers seamless access to critical assets, while 75% of exposure incidents along attack paths lead to "dead ends," preventing cybercriminals from reaching sensitive information.

While cyberattacks have been on the rise in recent years, one of the biggest threats to organizations’ cybersecurity is fatigue in the IT team, which leads to burnout syndrome. Gartner predicts that half of security managers will change jobs by 2025 due to industry-wide burnout. A recent study reveals that 66% of cybersecurity professionals in Europe claim to have experienced fatigue during 2022. In addition, 51% say they have worked more than four hours extra a week above their scheduled hours.

Since 2013, World Password Day has been celebrated on the first Thursday of May and aims to foster better password habits. This event reminds us that passwords are the main guardians of our digital identities and that we must implement complex passwords such as passphrases capable of protecting us. In 2022 alone, 721.5 million exposed credentials were leaked online. As a result of these leaks, account takeover attacks (ATOs) are on the rise.

The need for skilled cybersecurity personnel is having an impact on companies’ ability to stay secure. Despite the global cybersecurity workforce growing to 4.7 million in 2022, reaching record levels, according to data from the (ISC)2 2022 workforce study, there’s still a need for more than 3.4 million security professionals, an increase of 26% over 2021.

Digital transformation has reached all sectors, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These organizations have now become more dependent on technology to improve their ability to deliver and scale programs, engage with beneficiaries, and ensure an agile response to populations in need. Although this transformation delivers many benefits for NGOs, it has made them a viable and attractive target for cybercriminals.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jay Bretzmann, research vice president of security products at IDC. We discussed various security topics trending in 2023, including open identity standards, passwordless technologies like passkeys enabled by FIDO 2.0, and identity-first zero trust security strategies. It became clear that we had an opportunity to share these insights by turning our conversations into an Analyst Connection interview.