Join Sean Martin and Theresa Lanowitz, Chief Evangelist, to hear how LevelBlue simplifies securing your most valuable business assets by providing broad cybersecurity experience and award-winning services to find that critical balance between resilience and innovation in cybersecurity. Discover how businesses can adapt to new risks while driving digital transformation and enhancing their cyber resilience strategies.
We are in the era of dynamic computing – and while that gives way to innovation, it also escalates the risks every business faces. Computing no longer occurs solely within the perimeter, and cybersecurity threats are increasingly more sophisticated. In fact, organizations today operate in a climate where entire systems can be taken offline in just a few short hours – and leaders need to be prepared for recovery from an interruption to the networks, systems, or data that underpin their business. With the advent and proliferation of new technologies, there is more pressure than ever to secure organizations’ computing. Ultimately, the evolution of computing has forced businesses into a paradox of innovation and risk. They must balance technology with security and business resilience, which requires a new way of thinking.
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Guest: Theresa Lanowitz, Chief Evangelist of AT&T Cybersecurity / LevelBlue [@LevelBlueCyber]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresalanowitz/
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Prioritizing Cyber Resilience for your Business | 7 Minutes on ITSPmagazine | A Short Brand Innovation Story From RSA Conference 2024 | A LevelBlue Story with Theresa Lanowitz
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Sean Martin: [00:00:00] Here we are, we're ready for another seven minutes on ITSP Magazine with a new short brand story. Today I'm joined by the one and only Teresa Lenowitz, the Chief Evangelist at Level Blue, the company that simplifies the security of your most valuable business assets by providing broad cyber security experience and award winning services.
Welcome Teresa.
Theresa Lanowitz: Hi Sean, it is wonderful to be here with you.
Sean Martin: Uh, it's fabulous having on, and I'm, I'm excited for this seven minutes, uh, a topic that keeps coming up for me, uh, resilience and, uh, balancing that with innovation. It seems resilience, uh, has grown. I don't know if it's grown in importance, but certainly in conversations topic that I've heard many times over the past number of months, but it, it sits alongside the, the, the continued pressures for advanced innovations and like AI and even faster times to market.
Um, so what are some of the things that you and the Level Blue team are seeing and hearing as you speak with some [00:01:00] of your customers? Well,
Theresa Lanowitz: I think you're absolutely right. Resilience is one of those words that you hear all the time. And I think we started hearing about resilience more in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic.
Businesses of all types had to be resilient. They had to pivot their business model to serve their customers where their customers were. And what we're seeing now are some of the leftovers, some of the side effects of what started with that different. Business model pivot that moved being more resilient.
Some of the work that we've done at level blue. We came out with our big annual futures report. And what we found in that futures report is that 72 percent of governance teams inside of organizations do not know what cyber resilience is, yet they know that innovation is Is causing more risk. 85 percent of them say innovation is causing risk, but 73 percent of them say, you know what?
That innovation, we're willing to take that trade [00:02:00] off in risk for innovation. But what we also found out is that digital transformation, a word that we heard two words we heard a lot of during the pandemic, those projects are incomplete in many cases, and the residual effect of those. Incomplete digital transformation projects are causing a lack of cyber resilience.
So this idea of cyber resilience is that the top number is that 72 percent of governance teams do not know what it is because they conflate it with cybersecurity.
Sean Martin: And on this point, I think last time we spoke, we touched on the idea that there's been a tighter coupling with the CIO and the CISO in this regard as well.
And do you find that there's an understanding of resilience from an IT resilience perspective? And they. And teams plan for that, but the cyber stuff is still a little unknown, uncertain in terms [00:03:00] of what it really means. And they, they just wing it for that. Is that the
Theresa Lanowitz: technical term? Just win it. See, is that a lot of organizations hear the word cyber and they say, Oh, see, so anything bailiwick, that's, that's your, your area of expertise, but with cyber resilience, it's about that whole organization, about that whole organization.
Knowing how to be resilient when something unexpected happens, whether it is a cyber event, somebody takes down your network, whether it is a hurricane or some other type of man made. Event that takes us offline. And it's about how that business can cope and still deliver on those service level agreements to their customers.
Whoever those customers are, whether you're in a business to business environment or business to consumer environment. And then we bring cyber security in there and we layer cyber security in [00:04:00] and that's specifically in the domain of the chief security officer, the CISO or the chief information security officer.
And oftentimes that chief information security officer, that team does not necessarily have the right representation in with the team. The CIO or the CTO to be able to talk to the whole organization. And I think that's something that we should expect to see change over the next year, couple of years or so as well, is that, that that CISO is now part of that direct report organization up to the CEO.
Sean Martin: And what, what did some of those conversations sound like? And I don't know if you have any. Any, uh, customer, you don't have to name them, but any experiences, uh, speaking with folks where that collaboration is well understood and they're putting forth a plan that covers the broader spectrum of results.
Theresa Lanowitz: When I talk with our clients who say they have this understanding of [00:05:00] cyber resilience and how important it is, they're the ones who say. One of them told me this great story, they were at an offsite and the topic of cyber resilience came up and the CEO said, okay, CIO, CTO, CISO, line of business, what are you doing for cyber resilience?
And they all looked at the CISO and said, well, it's the CISO's problem. It's cyber. So therefore it's the CISO's problem. And that is one of the top problems is that from the top down, the idea of cyber resilience, the idea of what you have to do to keep your business running and how you can gain better security.
By aligning your business objectives with your cyber security strategy and by taking on this idea of a whole organization understanding that when something goes down in the I. T. estate that we don't have a lot of visibility [00:06:00] in when something goes down in the I. T. estate, it's all of us who have to worry about bringing it back online.
It's all of us who have to worry about continuing with those service level agreements to our clients. It's all of us who And so that, that idea of an offsite with the direct reports to the CEO and, you know, people not really understanding where cyber resilience lies, that's a perfect example. And the CEO looked at them and said, well, wait a second.
If this application goes down over here, that's not the problem with a CISO. You know, so how are you working together to get that application back up? And he said that it was at that moment that all of them said, Oh, we need to work together. And I think we often say this, I mean, you and I have talked about this numerous times we say this, but in reality, it's something that is, it's, it's fairly difficult to really comprehend because you know, We're so interested and so concerned about running our day to day business that oftentimes we don't take a step back [00:07:00] and look at what we need to think about for the future.
Sean Martin: Teresa, thank you so much for, uh, this seven minutes on ITSB magazine. I'm going to encourage everybody to look at, uh, levelblue.
com slash ITSB. Future's report to download a copy of that report. Thank you.
Theresa Lanowitz: Thanks so much.