Brief on Gartner Security and Risk Summit in London

This year's Gartner Security and Risk Summit in London was a great opportunity to delve into the latest trends, challenges, and best practices in the fast-changing landscape of security and risk management.

It was good to see many of the world's leading cybersecurity firms such as Cloudflare, Arctic Wolf, LastPass, and HackerOne make it to the event. While these global giants are mostly headquartered and founded in the USA, the European landscape, with some notable exceptions like Darktrace and Bitdefender, is more nascent. There remains a clear opportunity for cybersecurity to grow over here, and Paladin is on a mission to help its development by backing early stage companies this side of the pond.

With great speakers such as Jay Chaudhury, the CEO & Co-Founder of ZScaler, Danny Jenkins from Threatlocker, and Ben Jones from Searchlight, the audience was educated on everything from SASE, to malware protection, to risks in the dark web. Never before has there been so much happening in cybersecurity, and its importance is no longer something that CISOs need to explain to their leadership teams.

Indeed, one of the core messages at the Gartner event this year was that cybersecurity is a strategic board level matter. According to a Gartner data point, more than 80% of CISOs present to their boards at least quarterly, up from just shy of 60% in 2016. In fact, Gartner predicts that two-thirds of global 100 organizations will extend their Directors & Officers Liability Insurance to cybersecurity executives due to increased legal exposure.

In line with putting CISO to the center of the conference, William Candrick, Director Analyst at Gartner, spoke about 'augmented cybersecurity leadership'. It wouldn't be a 2024 conference without a mention of AI and while AI will, as it has already, create whole new types of threats ranging from deep fakes to misinformation, it will also provide ways for the whole organization to react more quickly and sift through larger amounts of data to find the signal faster than before.

CISOs will play a crucial role in balancing this AI journey. AI will ultimately empower every function, but the CISO must be at the center so that this is done in a safe and compliant way. This is why we invest in companies that facilitate the pivotal and constantly evolving CISO role, such as Calypso AI, which is developing solutions for the pressing issue of AI validation, security, and explainability challenges facing both enterprises and governments, or IriusRisk that allows security departments to model the threats related to AI ahead of time.

Organizations will face a multitude of challenges over the coming years as volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, coined as 'VUCA' by Gartner, continue to cast their shadow. Whether it's GenAI, battling misinformation, or figuring insider risk, all of which were topics highly present at the conference, one thing is clear - the CISO will be in the middle.

Despite living in uncertain times marked by incredibly fast technological development that can be both exciting and scary at the same time, we at Paladin feel more comfortable than ever to be investing into software that protects people and organizations from these known and unknown threats, such as IriusRisk, Expel, and Nisos. This year's Gartner Summit was a great reminder that never has it before been a better time to be a cybersecurity investor than it is today.