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This week's episode of Defense in Depth

How Vendors Should Approach CISOs

 On this episode of Defense in Depth:

Co-host Allan Alford and Ian Amit, CSO, Cimpress, discussed:

• All CISOs are different so any advice we provide will vary from CISO to CISO. Plus, we have an entire other show, CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Podcast, dedicated to this very topic.

• We acknowledge that this is tough because to be really on target you need to know what the CISO has, what their mix of products are, and how your product could work in their current security maturity and mix of security products and processes. It's all a very tall order for a security vendor.

• Vendors must stop thinking of themselves as point solutions, but rather how they fit into the overall makeup of a security program. You're not coming in with a blank slate. How do you interoperate with what's existing?

• There's unfortunately the trend of the people who make the contact, then initiate a meeting, and hand off to someone else. CISOs do not welcome that kind of engagement, although it may be very cost effective for security vendors to hire junior people to make those contacts and hand offs.

• Lots of argument about the efficacy and the acceptance of cold calling. Those who claim they don't like it are often working at organizations that do it repeatedly to great success.

• The pushy salesperson who eventually gets through after repeated attempts even when they're told no may show success, but they don't calculate all the people they've angered and the word-of-mouth negativity that has resulted from that behavior. If you push beyond a request to stop, the worse that can happen is your reputation will be destroyed.

• CISOs are more receptive to market pull into your organization. That can happen through traditional marketing, content marketing, podcasts, analyst reviews, and word-of-mouth. Problem is these techniques don't leave any room for salespeople to operate.

Thanks to this week's sponsor of Defense in Depth, Sonrai Security.

Identity and data access complexity are exploding in your public cloud. 10,000+ pieces of compute, 1000s of roles, and a dizzying array of interdependencies and inheritances. Sonrai Security delivers an 

enterprise cloud security platform

 that identifies and monitors every possible relationship between identities and data that exists inside your public cloud. 

TOMORROW, Friday [8-7-20] We're Hacking Cybersecurity Marketing

Join us this Friday, August 7th, 2020 at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern for "Hacking Cybersecurity Marketing: An hour of critical thinking on best ways to get security professionals to know and care about your product”.I'll be leading this discussion with Steve Zalewski, deputy CISO, Levi Strauss, and my co-host for Defense in Depth podcast, Allan Alford.REGISTERPlus, immediately after the video chat (11:00 AM PT/2:00 PM ET) we'll rollover to the CISO Series Friday Meetup. Each participant will be randomly matched up in impromptu 1-on-1 five-minute conversations with fellow cybersecurity professionals. Link to do that will be made available during the video chat.

Best Moments from “Hacking AWS” Video Chat

Here are six minutes of last week’s "Hacking AWS: An hour of critical thinking on how to assess the risks of AWS configurations".

Joining me in the discussion were

• Trevor Hawthorn, managing partner, Stratum Security

• Jon Ehret, vp of strategy & risk, RiskRecon

• Plus, special appearance by Brent Williams, CISO, SurveyMonkey

If you’d like to see the entire video, go 

here

.

Thanks to our video chat sponsor, RiskRecon.

Get a toolkit for assessing AWS security configurations! This new playbook and the accompanying questionnaire were built to help you achieve better risk outcomes by providing you with the knowledge and tools to objectively assess the security quality of any Amazon Web Services deployment.

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