Patrick Peterson, CEO & Founder, Agari, attended the recent RSA conference and has shared the following comments
“At this year’s RSA conference, it became apparent that the influx of new start-ups focused on malware, breach detection or threat intelligence, means that there is a lack of solutions that solve the inherent security issues that bedevil our digital economy and harm brands and people.
As a result, it was also obvious that there is a huge opportunity for the security industry to mature.
Just five years ago, there were precious few boards of large companies that gave even a second thought to security. But now, with high-profile and costly breaches it is something that they must address and board level executives are now concerned about security en masse.
What used to be conversations principally about speeds and feeds are becoming far more nuanced and about the real business value of cybersecurity. Against an unrelenting drumbeat of data breaches, the CISO is increasingly being called upon to secure not just companies’ IT infrastructures, but also their customers. If large companies get breached, valuable personal information gets stolen, and customers get burned. They lose trust in that company, its brand, and they go elsewhere.
The reality is, in our industry, there’s a very asymmetrical battle raging in which our opponents — be they nation-states, terrorists or individual actors — have a tremendous advantage. They can be right once but we have to be right all the time. They don’t have to get to the CIO or the CISO to get the goods; they can get to the goods by exploiting a company’s vendors, its Active Directory, or spear-phishing individual employees.
For our industry as a whole, it’s not about building more widgets. Widgets are ephemeral. It’s about recognising the importance of building a truly business-oriented approach to cybersecurity and safeguarding customers. To fundamentally fix the technology stack upon which criminal innovation lives, we need open standards that generate a network effect of threat-data sharing and a virtuous cycle of trust and security.”
By Patrick Peterson, CEO & Founder, Agari
About Agari
Agari builds disruptive, Internet-scale, data-driven security solutions that eliminate email as a channel for cyberattacks and enable businesses and consumers to interact safely, and is leading an ever-growing coalition of security partners to help fix email for good. The Agari cloud-based SaaS solution aggregates data from 2.5 billion mailboxes to help global brands eliminate email threats, protect customers and their personal data, and proactively guard brand reputation. Today, Agari analyzes more than 6.5 billion messages per day, identifies more than 2 million malicious URLs per month, and blocks more than 200 million malicious emails per month. Founded by the thought leaders behind Cisco’s IronPort solutions, Agari, a recipient of the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation Award and recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Security, Agari is backed by Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Greylock Partners and Scale Venture Partners. Agari is headquartered in San Mateo, California.
