Enabling Data-Informed Edge Decisions – Theresa Lanowitz, AT&T Cybersecurity

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong TV. I'm really happy to introduce you to our next guest.

Her name is Theresa Lanowitz. And Teresa is the head of that evangelism at AT&T business cybersecurity Teresa. Welcome to Tech strong TV.

It's a pleasure to have you here. Hi Alan. Thanks for much so much for having me.

It's really wonderful to speak with you. Good, it's great. Well.

I hope so. I hope you enjoy it and you know, but thank you Teresa before we jump into what we will the meat of what we want to talk about today. I was gonna ask if it's okay.

If you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit of your own personal story with our audience and also educating us a bit on AT&T Business cybersecurity Solutions. Yeah, so I'll start with my quick background on myself first. So my name is Theresa lanowitz and I'm head of cybersecurity evangelism with AT&T business and prior to joining AT&T cybersecurity at AT&T business.

I was an industry analyst for quite a number of years. I was a product manager on several products that you're listening audience. Probably remembers Borland J Builder.

I worked on Borland c++, So a lot of those sort of big pieces of technology that really really shaped the industry and now here at AT&T cybersecurity. Everybody knows AT&T one of the most recognizable brands in the world, but a lot of people don't know about AT&T cyber security. So at AT&T cybersecurity, we offer two ways to engage with our clients.

The first is through our cyber security consulting services, and the second is through our managed Security Services. And so what we're really focused on with AT&T cybersecurity is helping To make it safer for your business to innovate whether you are building airplanes providing Financial Services or selling flowers on Main Street, every organization wants to be able to give their customer a better experience and we're focused on allowing you to innovate in your core business and then having us help you with your cybersecurity. Love it.

Thank you. And you know just to expand on that a moment Teresa. I mean over the years AT&T.

has partnered acquired a lot of kind of Best in Class Market leading technologies that allow them to you know, come to Market with a pretty robust solution or set of solutions really not just a solution a pretty robust robust set of solutions. You know, that really kind of soup the nuts if you will in terms of what you need to protect your business. Yeah, most definitely and that's where we are now as managed security services provider we partner with we work with the top cybersecurity suppliers in the industry to offer that managed Security Services and AT&T cybersecurity while our managed Security Services have been around for quite some time in our cybersecurity Consulting has been around for quite some time.

AT&T cybersecurity was formed in Earnest in 2019 with the finalization of the acquisition of alien ball. So if anybody remembers Alien Vault AT&T acquired alien involt and alien vault is now or in central to what we provide with our managed Security Services and along with that our alien Labs technology, our alien Labs technology is a threat intelligence unit of AT&T cyber security. So all of that enriched information that enrich data that our alien Labs team brings through those indicators of compromise that they're looking at worldwide, really Feeds into what we're doing inside of our managed Security Services and we have eight Global stocks that operate 24/7 365 are sock analysts our AT&T cybersecurity Consultants.

They have the latest in the certifications. We have every type of hardened environment that you could possibly ask for. So we offer a breadth and depth of services at AT&T cybersecurity.

Excellent just full disclosure. I was on the board of advisors at alien fall. So if I was happy to see you buy it require it for some good reasons anyway, and I'm glad to see that it's living on and thriving under you know, the AT&T umbrella.

Teresa I wanted to talk to you a little bit today that though about the edge right for a while. There it seemed you know had these things go with the hype Cycles, right? They get overhyped the so-called travel disillusionment only to rise out into the plateau of productivity or whatever that they call it.

Right? The edge The Edge was one of these over hide things right all the sudden we were moving everything from the we moved everything to the cloud and now we're going from the cloud to the edge and You know life's never black and white like that either is technology. It's always great.

There's still stuff that wasn't moving to the cloud. There's still stuff. That'll never be moved to the cloud.

And they'll be stuff that never go to the edge, but nevertheless the edge. And the devices attached to the edge and when we talk about the edge, we start thinking and talking about 5G and what that brings to the equation. It's an important Frontier in Computing and like everything else.

It seems in technology at the end of that train. There's a caboose with security with someone says hey, have you thought about the security implications of this? What does it mean?

So we're gonna talk today. It's a little bit about what CISO right what security pros and and leaders should be thinking and what they should know about Edge adoption and what we can do to maybe not be the Caboose anymore, but get up towards that engine. Right the front of the train first class seats.

Help us. Yeah, that's a really good analogy because as you said there's this plethora of computing out there now all the way back Mainframe client server web mobile applications that are sitting around out there and we're poised on this precipice of a new era of computing called Edge and when you hear the term Edge, everybody seems to have a different definition of it and those definitions tend to skew towards the technology stack that somebody is using So what we have here at AT&T cybersecurity is every year we launch our big thought leadership piece of research called the AT&T cybersecurity insights report and for the past four additions. What we've really been focused on is as you mentioned this idea of 5G lower latency higher bandwidth Network.

So a brand new generation of network built from the ground up with security built into it. But what about everything you're attaching to that Network your applications your data your endpoints and that's when we started taking a look at this idea of edge Computing and from a definition perspective when we are talking about Edge today if we think of some primary characteristics, Those characteristics rather than sort of a standard, you know academic type of definition. The characteristics are software-defined and that can be on-prem or in the cloud.

We also have this idea that it is really data Centric. So the applications the workload the hosting everything is closer to where that data is being generated and consumed and then finally it's this distributed model of management intelligence and networks. So those are kind of the characteristics that these Edge Computing use cases that we've uncovered really having common and that's the way I like to frame the conversation about what we're doing with Edge.

excellent so I think that's a great definition and a great kind of we set the landscape if you will Let's hear a little bit about what are we you know from and really, you know from a security point of view. What are what should we be doing with Edge? What are we actually in fact doing right?

Does that mean what my mom thinks? I do what my friends think I do what my spouse thinks I do what I really do, right and You know, what? What is what would let's get down to the truth here.

What what should we be doing? And what are we not doing? What are we doing?

Yeah, so if we think of this idea of edge Computing and it is about data it's about This distributed model model of management intelligence and networks software-defined. And if you think about what's been going on is we're moving further and further away from being Tethered to some type of device like a laptop a desktop a phone a tablet and we're really now living in this world of Internet of Things So what we're looking at is Edges largely being defined by these internet of things instantiations and what you're getting is near real time information about what's going on. So I give you an example of a couple of use cases.

Oh we surveyed for this AT&T cyber security insights report. We surveyed seven different vertical markets Finance Health Care retail manufacturing energy and utilities transportation and US public sector and each of them came back and said here's our primary use case. So for transportation, for example, their primary use case that they said this is where we are.

This is the use case that we're Is two full-scale implementation and Adoption of Fleet Management manufacturing. It's smart warehousing. So robotic robotic management of a warehouse in 2022 the top use case was for manufacturing and that top use case was visual Quality Inspection on the assembly line.

So we're seeing this evolution of use cases of edge use cases over the years and from a security perspective to me. What is so so important and so so I opening is that we saw that over the past several years security really moved from being this technical problem to being a business enabler. Everybody wants to talk about security as you said and from an edge perspective security is now part and parcel of the discussion from the beginning.

So what we found in our research is that organizations are spending almost equally there's this balanced investment that's going on. Between security strategy and planning the network and applications and so is somebody who has spent a long time in the security world and a long time in the application world. It is so encouraging to see that organizations are saying all right, we have this Edge budget and we're going to allocate almost equally it came out to network was 30% strategy and planning was 23% and applications and security were 22% of the overall budget and this is in the early phases.

So, you know, if you think five years ago or so a new type of use case a new type of application that an organization was going to really stand up and deliver security was always an afterthought. It was always let's put it out there and see what happens and this idea of digital transformation that we have lived with over the past couple of years and now operationalizing that digital transformation and moving to a digital first. Experiences we are with Edge Computing.

This is really changed how people were looking at security. And the other thing that I believe is really really important that we learn from our research is that organizations are taking a look at this and saying We can no longer live in those silos that we've built up inside of our organizations over the past 40 50 plus years. They're saying this is a time for cross-functional collaboration and oh on the security side.

This is not a do-it-yourself type of security environment that we're living in because things are changing. We know the endpoints are changing the endpoints are changing drastically. And so what organizations are saying is that we're going to look for a trusted advisor to really help us on this journey to the edge.

In fact 71% of our survey participants from the AT&T cybersecurity insights report so that once they put a use case in production, they are definitely using some type of third-party trusted advisor to help them whether that is managed Security Services a Consulting organization Global Systems integration and so on. So they're seeking to help of the third party trusted advisor. So those are two big things that came out of the report and that's from an empirical point of view.

We're seeing that and we have started to see that now year over year from the past three years or so where we have been doing research on on the edge and what's happening with security at the edge. Hmm, I get something else. I want to jump in on you with that.

com and you can get your complimentary copy of the report. Excellent, so can't walk more than three steps without tripping over AI these days. right Where does this AI generated AI gbt with GPT GPT, whatever.

Any any kind of role or do you see how that might disrupt or be involved here in this? Certainly, what we're seeing from. Our research is that organizations are saying understanding that endpoint protecting those endpoints and we still have to protect everything else, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning we've gone from Mainframe to client server to web mobile applications.

But as we know move to the edge this idea of threat intelligence and enrich threat intelligence to understand what is really going on at a broad scale is going to be critically important so really making sure that you're using those right cybersecurity controls As you move to the edge and making sure that you're understanding what you're threat intelligence is telling you in fact, one of the things we learned in our research is people told us that when they had when they were in the ideation phase of these Edge use cases, they would say cybersecurity controls. Well, we're not really so sure how many cybersecurity controls we would need or if we really even need any cyber security controls when they're in the ideation phase Then once they go past ideation and they do a little bit more research and maybe they conduct a proof of concept and then they'll do a partial implementation the more use cases and the more they see what Edge can deliver to them from a competitive business standpoint the more they say cybersecurity controls are important and along with those cybersecurity controls comes this idea of threat intelligence and enrich threat intelligence and understanding what is going to happen to this use case further on down the road. So it's it's really important and one of the other things we found in this this is really kind of a surprising stat that we found is of course, everybody says, you know, there's this perceived risk of a Cyber attack As you move to the edge now.

What is it? What is the real risk? There's this perception that there's going to be some type of cyber event.

And I think that's a healthy point of skepticism for everybody to have. What we found out is that in the 2023 AT&T cybersecurity insights report people are most concerned about DDOS attacks. So that's a really really big shift from where we were last year in 2022.

People said we're most concerned about ransomware as the object of And this year in 2023, they're saying DDOS and if you think about the idea of a DDOS attack saying I'm just going to take down this Internet of Things world that you have built out there. I'm going to continue to hit against these devices that you have out there. It can really disrupt the business and if you think about it from from an iot perspective, it's a whole lot easier for an adversary to execute some type of DDOS attack then wait for somebody to download a malicious file or click on a malicious link to really execute some type of ransomware objective.

So it's really interesting how those perceived attack vectors are changing and a lot of that comes into play because of the differing endpoints that we're seeing. So we're seeing that organizations as they identify these Edge use cases. They're saying yes, this is really going to help us deliver a really good business outcome, but our endpoints we have to make sure that we Are building our endpoints that are resilient enough to to take on any changes that are going to come about with with Edge Computing and where we are now.

Most organizations are saying yeah are endpoints are they're the traditional endpoints desktops laptops tablets phones and so on. But as we look out three to five years we start to see these purpose-built intentional endpoints. So things such as wearables from the medical community things such as autonomous vehicles autonomous Rockets autonomous drones from possibly manufacturing and energy and utilities things such as very purpose-built and intentional robotics inside of a factory for example for manufacturing.

So the endpoints are changing the way you secure those endpoints will be changing. Everything is changing making sure that you're using those proper cyber security controls is really critical. agreed Teresa where overtime I'm afraid.

I've got a wrap it up. But you know, this is a great conversation Teresa lanowitz head of evangelism at AT&T business cybers cybersecurity. Here are Tech Strunk TV.

We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.