Warning: The following article may contain sentiments that are loud, unpopular, and highly debatable.
In an industry where each week seemingly bears news of a breach, acquisition, or a new attack method, everybody has an opinion, and some of them really pack a punch.
IT Brew caught up with five cybersecurity professionals to discuss their hottest industry takes.
These responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Joe Head, founder of Molto, a UK-based personal branding agency for cyber professionals, said the overuse of buzzwords in the industry is a buzzkill.
“The biggest issue we have is that communication of value around the products and services of cybersecurity vendors. The biggest shift I think needs to happen, and what I find really frustrating in the market, is the amount of language that’s used and the complete corporate jargon that people just don’t understand.”
Suresh Katukam, CPO and co-founder of network-as-a-service provider Nile, said companies should not be fooled by networking vendors who just tack on AI capabilities to legacy stacks.
“You can bolt AI onto legacy gear and call it autonomous just like you can make a 1992 Toyota sedan self-driving. You have to go back to redesigning the car to make it an autonomous car. You can’t just slap AI on a Toyota Corolla. Just like self-driving cars, you need to rethink every part of the vehicle or every part of networking and build the entire architecture foundation from the ground up for AI.”
Rob Black, founder and CEO of Fractional CISO, said the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) may feel heat if they don’t get a handle on the alleged standards problem across the system and organization control type 2 (SOC 2) community.
“Basically, a lot of people are complaining about SOC 2. Some are doing a great job, some are doing a terrible job. But the AICPA is not worried about their quality assurance for these low-end auditors. They’re not stepping in, and if this continues, some other standard will displace it.”
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Patrick Quirk, SVP and general manager at network management company Opengear, said another “DeepSeek moment” is on the way, and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
“If you look at the evolution of almost any technology, you see these inflection points. You get your early adopters, the valley of disbelief, and then finally long-term adoption. But to hit that adoption point, you know, you’ve got to get optimization…Now we’re at a point where we’ve got to go in and optimize the algorithms. That’s all DeepSeek was, but they weren’t the only ones doing it. Everybody was doing it. We should expect six months from now, another DeepSeek moment where somebody is going to come up with something that is the next improvement. And then a little while after that, there’ll be another one. These things that appear to be outliers really happen all the time, and it’s a part of that technology journey that happens in almost any industry.”
Chris McHenry, SVP of product management at Aviatrix, said the industry is overhyping AI security, and that the real focus should be on what Google’s acquisition of Wiz signals for cloud security moving forward.
“There’s a lot of things that are really interesting about it, but what it highlights is how outrageously important cloud security is, and I don’t see enough people talking about it. I don’t see enough innovation in the space, especially when it comes to fundamental security, things that have been the tried and true components of cybersecurity for decades. My feeling is that the problems that Wiz solves are a symptom of the fact that organizations move to the cloud without considering security first.”