Cybersecurity: 10 Insights from Top Entrepreneurs

/in /by Jed Leidheiser

At The Montgomery Summit 2021 presented by March Capital, a dozen cybersecurity leaders shared the ground truth of how enterprises are responding to the evolving threat landscape.

CEOs and founders of companies such as Snyk, Netskope, Dragos, Orca, and Very Good Security also forecast “what’s next” for cybersecurity.  Here’s what we heard:

Top 10 Insights

  1. Security is shifting from a tax, to a business enabler; security wins the trust of the consumer.
  2. Perimeters are ephemeral. New architectures mean that applications are smaller and more transient than ever before.
  3. Every real-world operation will want to adopt Zero Trust. Distributed workforces will remain the norm, providing a tailwind to network security and access management companies.
  4. Privacy solutions will become ubiquitous within 5 years, regardless of whether the driver is regulatory, compliance, or the customer himself/herself.
  5. Third-party vendors and partners are now an essential part of any businesses. Thus, supply chain transparency and resiliency will become increasingly important.
  6. Any enterprise with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Governance, Risk, & Compliance (GRC) system will need a Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM).
  7. Industrial security is becoming necessary across sectors, not just for Energy or Government.
  8. Startups are seeing a shift in buyer profiles. What used to be CSO sales, is now increasingly decided by a BSO (business unit security officer) or a functional security lead (e.g., threat management lead).  Soon, developers will be the most important influencer and user of security solutions.  Any selling process that ignores the developer will lose out.
  9. Security companies are slowing moving towards consumption-based pricing models, which is now commonplace for infrastructure and allows enterprises to match value and cost.
  10. The cloud will create dramatically more secure ecosystems. Startups with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud solutions will be best positioned to succeed, and avoid being subsumed into the core offerings of cloud providers.

All told, it should not be surprising that the startups who presented are innovating relentlessly to match increasingly sophisticated adversaries, such as those seen in the Solarwinds/Sunburst and Microsoft Exchange attacks.

In 2020, $10.7B was invested in Cybersecurity across 539 transactions, and $20B spent on M&A across 178 transactions. There has been a clear focus on Cyber as organizations recalibrate to new threats and surface area.  Will 2021 be another big year for Cyber?  We think so.

 

APPENDIX – MONTGOMERY SUMMIT 2021 SPEAKERS

Spotlight Presenters: Snyk, Netskope, Forter

Securing the Cloud Economy Panelists: Very Good Security, Orca, Valtix, Styra

Moderator: Jed Leidheiser

Frontiers of Innovation in Cybersecurity Panelists: Xage, Dragos, Enveil, Prevalion, Panaseer

Moderator: Bob Ackerman