Karen Buffo is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at MixMode. In this role, she is responsible for product, solution, account-based marketing, customer programs, brand and creative, communications, analyst relations, field and channel marketing and enablement. Prior to MixMode, Buffo was the CMO of Anomali and the CMO of Symantec, a Division of Broadcom and held several leadership roles during her tenure at Oracle. She is a recognized industry keynote speaker, mentor, and contributor to the Cybersecurity community.
The Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit is always a premier venue for cyber security practitioners to network, learn and interact with Gartner’s leading IT security experts. This year’s summit saw a record 5,000 attendees come together to learn about the latest trends, strategies, and solutions in risk management and cybersecurity.
The Summit kicked off with a keynote from Gartner Analysts, Christoper Mixter and Dennis Xu, focused on this year’s theme, “Augmented Cybersecurity and How to Thrive Amid the Complexity”. They highlighted how the complexities of cybersecurity continue to grow amid the expanding attack surface, skills shortage and new technologies like AI, resulting in the need for a much stronger focus on response and recovery. While prevention and detection remain critical, there is a large gap in response and recovery and Gartner recommends organizations double down in three key areas:
- Fault Tolerant Organization: Organizations need to understand that with the spike in GenAI attacks, the use of 3rd party organizations, and growth in technology, a breach could happen. Organizations need to abandon a zero-tolerance for failure mindset and be capable of taking risks through prevention, detection, and an elevated focus on response and recovery.
- Minimum Effective Tool-set: Security staff spend way too much time just managing tools. Gartner recommends creating an inventory to eliminate redundancy and gaps, leveraging AI to make tools more efficient and then reducing the amount of tools to the fewest.
- Resilient Cyber Workforce: Create room for people to breathe and invest in a resilient workforce through wellness programs and self-care employee workflows to avoid burnout.
Other key themes and topics at the summit included:
- AI and Machine Learning were prominent themes at this year’s summit. While the majority of sessions included the topic of AI, consensus was that we are in the very early stages of what AI is capable of, including what it will do to augment cybersecurity and how adversaries will leverage it for harm.
- Cybersecurity Burnout was another major theme. With cybersecurity threats and workloads increasing, burnout has become a serious issue impacting retention and the mental health of security professionals. Sessions focused on addressing burnout through a combination of technology, processes, cultural change, wellness and resilience. One of the more compelling sessions around this theme was “Never Give Up” delivered by the British adventurer Bear Grylls who provided an inspiring view of how leaders can overcome obstacles, take calculated risks and make brave decisions through learning from failure, facing your fears, endurance, and faith in yourself.
- SOC optimization and the Augmented SOC were other key focus areas at this year’s summit, reflecting the importance of maturing and enhancing detection and incident response capabilities. Sessions focused on the importance of adopting new AI technologies, skills development and operational models to transform SOCs into more efficient, proactive security detection and response engines.
- The convergence of information technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) was also front and center, reflecting the growing interconnectedness of business systems and industrial control systems. Sessions highlighted the importance of a holistic approach to the two domains as they continue to merge.
This Exhibit Showcase was also broken out by themes, or what Gartner calls Solution Villages. Exhibitors were strategically placed on the showroom floor by their primary product offering. Villages included: Application Security, Cloud Security, Data Security, Identity & Access Management, Risk Resilience & Compliance Management, Security Strategy, Management & Governance, Threat Intelligence & Vulnerability Management, Security Operations & Analytics, Infrastructure, Network & Endpoint Security as well as the Startup Village. Key themes across the villages were similar to those of the sessions, with AI-driven cyber security, SOC Optimization, and attack surface management taking center stage. There was no shortage of hands-on demos, networking and swag.
The Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2024 proved an unparalleled opportunity to gain insights into the future of cybersecurity. As cyber threats continue escalating, events like these are vital for defending against the next wave of attacks.
MixMode had great conversations during the summit, particularly those around Advanced AI, Augmented Threat Detection and Response and SOC optimization. To learn more about how MixMode’s advanced AI Platform can help you achieve comprehensive threat detection and optimize your SOC, visit our website or request a demo.
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