Rob Amezcua- GartnerSEC 2024 - Cybersecurity Standup

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so Rob Amezcua, I'm the Senior Vice President of Sales for Forescout worldwide.

Well, I don't have an interesting path, but I've been in cyber for a long time. Like I tell people, I was actually in cyber before cyber was cool. So I'm basically an OG of the cyber world. No, it's been great. I've been fortunate enough, blessed and a little lucky all along the way to get to this point. But I've been surrounded by amazing people, great mentors, great leaders all along my journey, so I have all of them to thank for my good fortune, for sure.

Oh man, if I started shouting them all out, I'd probably leave a couple out and hurt their feelings, so let's just say all of you. Shout out to all of you.

Yeah, day three, our dogs are barking for sure. We've been standing, walking a lot over the last couple days. The impressions are great. Number one, first impression is we've got a healthy industry. Look around, good gracious, there's a lot of focus on cyber, a lot of investment in cyber, a lot of attention on cyber. Cyber's still cool, and that's exciting for somebody like me who's been in it for many years. I think the industry is strong. Talking to a lot of the attendees, they need us. That's the other great part, you want to be in a place where you're needed. Cyber is a community sport and endeavor, it's a team sport. These vendors, we all compete, but we're all a family, and we need to help the practitioner out there get a little safer, definitely.

Yeah, I think it's interesting. I've again, doing this for 27 years or so. Security has evolved, but it's evolved in ways that are still about the basics. Not a lot fundamentally has changed. You still got to be able to see what you're securing, turn those lights on in the dark parts of your rooms and your networks. You got to understand the identity of people, access, applications, data, and put all that equation together. The trend I've seen talked about a lot because it's a hot topic when things go bad is ransomware attacks. How do you recover, prevent, contain, mitigate, enforce, block, get through consensus, and do all that on tight budgets and with no resources? It's a complex equation. Good luck to us all.

Well, I think you got to be holistic. The answer to that question is probably the opposite of what you expect. There is no silver bullet in security. Quite frankly, if there was, I'd be retired long ago and leave this to somebody else. It's one of those things where you need all sorts of aspects of the equation. You have to stitch all the pieces together. You need platforms that can make other tools better, complement, be agnostic to the equation, help you integrate, orchestrate, automate, so you get that force multiplier. Because nobody has enough money and nobody has enough people. Definitely, you got to make the tech work for you.

I totally agree. I was actually telling a CISO earlier, whether they're inside the CISO circle or just here attending as part of the show floor, the community aspect of this conference is fantastic. It's great to see these guys information sharing, sharing problems. It used to be that security was like 'well, it's security, I can't really talk about it.' Now everybody's talking about it because they need each other. I think they're more open with the vendor community as well, because we've got great perspective, ways to help. We may not always solve all the problem, but we can certainly pick up pieces and parts and make everything else they're doing a little bit better. So it's been a fun conference.

You know, I wish we were talking about being proactive a little bit more. I still think security is incident driven, very reactive in nature. My heart bleeds a little bit for the CISOs out there. They've got a tough job. They need to be able to use the proactive nature and really the learnings of a reactive event to drive more consensus, fight through some of the resistance they get inside their organizations to safely secure them properly. It's not all about availability; sometimes you got to do it in a safe fashion. I'd like to see those teams come together and start thinking about things in a post-incident manner but in a pre-incident posture. Does that make sense?

Well, they can find us at Forescout. They can find me there and find us on LinkedIn, find us all over the place. But yeah, come be informed on influenced.