Wendy Nather is Head of Advisory CISOs at Cisco’s Duo Security, based in Austin, Texas. She was previously the Research Director at the Retail ISAC, as well as Research Director of the Information Security Practice at independent analyst firm 451 Research. Wendy led IT security for the EMEA region of the investment banking division of Swiss Bank Corporation (now UBS), and served as CISO of the Texas Education Agency. She speaks regularly on topics ranging from threat intelligence to identity and access management, risk analysis, incident response, data security, and societal and privacy issues. Wendy is co-author of The Cloud Security Rules, and was listed as one of SC Magazine’s Reboot Leadership “Influencers” in 2018 and Women in IT Security “Power Players” in 2014.
Just about every CISO you meet has a scary tale to tell, just as everyone you meet probably has a tale to tell about a horrible accident that happened to them or someone they know. The security ghost stories are fun to tell at conferences. But telling them constantly, at length, doesn’t help us have a reasoned conversation with the business around risk.
As we get ready for the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, we’ve been thinking more about every element and imperative in their CARTA model: Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment. Since ‘C’ also stands for Cisco, let’s start there.
The punk ethos is very similar to Buddhism: you must question everything, especially what you believe is reality. This questioning attitude is especially important when you’re planning your zero trust implementation. In this post I walk you through the the trust assumptions vs. reality, and why should question everything.
The Law of IT Inertia: A system in use tends to remain in use. When the technology is written into applications, it’s expensive to write it back out again. When the software just works, it’s used by everything. What does this all imply for security?
Learn how zero-trust enables collaboration. The “zero trust” model can help you get along better with your users, customers, and partners.
