As early as I can remember, I’ve always loved technology—especially anything involving computers. I started my professional career in the mid-1990s working in the channel for a boutique systems integration firm in Houston providing technology solutions to Fortune 2000 companies. In my first role, I was a developer building enterprise applications. These were the early days of client-server architecture, where I developed new applications that replaced older legacy systems. Daily discussions of Java, relational databases, and multithreading were commonplace.

Life was great for a few years until my company decided to spin out that part of the business. Fortunately for me, I was able to transition into a network engineering role within the company. I established net-new local area networks for clients, managed existing networks, and occasionally got the opportunity to set up a new firewall here and there. Equipped with years of hands-on technical experience under my belt, I moved into a technical pre-sales role, working closely with account executives selling various technology solutions to clients. In my final channel role after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I managed a team of network engineers and oversaw successful professional service delivery for the West region.

In 2013, an opportunity presented itself to join an early-stage Silicon Valley cloud security startup, which I enthusiastically jumped headfirst into—it’s a requirement to work for a startup at least once if you live in the Bay Area, right? In that role, I became educated with the security market landscape and the challenges and use cases security vendors were addressing. Product vendors solving real-world security challenges were and still are extremely interesting to me. This was my lightbulb moment! It was at that point, I realized I wanted to exclusively pursue security in some capacity going forward in my career.

After learning a lot about securing cloud resources and wearing multiple hats, I left the startup world behind to join the competitive and market intelligence team at Tenable, where I became an expert in all things vulnerability management. I supported the sales team in winning deals, advised product management on key roadmap capabilities, features, and use cases, and also identified opportunities for partnerships and acquisitions. I spent over three years at Tenable until their IPO in 2018.

From there, I moved into a market intelligence role at Synopsys, where I was responsible for tracking the broader market landscape, discovering inorganic growth opportunities. I also helped them broaden their application security portfolio in building business cases for the acquisitions of three security companies: Tinfoil Security in 2020, Code Dx in 2021, and WhiteHat Security in 2022.

The Move to ESG

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know many well-respected industry analysts who cover the security space. I have admired and appreciated their data and reports, which were critical to me for understanding the direction of the market. So, with over 10 years of experience working for security vendors in addition to my broad technical background, it was a natural fit to transition to an industry analyst role myself.

I am excited to join TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group because it provides an opportunity to leverage my existing knowledge of the security landscape while also assisting vendors at the same time. From my time working on the vendor side, I keenly understand the dynamics of the security market and the challenges that vendors face at different maturity levels, and I look forward to conducting new research.

My core coverage areas include vulnerability and risk management, with my first research projects focused on risk management coming soon—stay tuned! I’ll also be assisting with adjacent areas, including application security, cloud security, and API security, since I have deep expertise with those areas as well. I’m looking forward to working with clients and engaging with companies in the space. If you’d like to get in touch to learn about Enterprise Strategy Group research and how we may be able to help, you can reach me on LinkedIn or send an email to david.vance@esg-global.com.

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To gain further insight into these trends, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 379 IT and cybersecurity professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) involved with zero-trust technologies and processes.

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Understanding the customer problem, creating that sense of urgency so your problem bubbles to the top, and differentiating the solution poses an ongoing challenge to any product marketer. Enterprises have a laundry list of security challenges along with finite resources. Chief information security officers—CISOs—with constrained resources need to zero in on those projects that have the most impact and ROI. The security vendor challenge lies in cutting through the market noise with clear and concise messaging so that the problem you solve makes the short list of projects, and that your offering makes the short list of solutions being evaluated to solve a CISO’s problem.

The through line in my journey is cybersecurity product marketing—getting inside the security team’s heads, understanding their pain, and how to message around solving that pain. I have worked my way from product manager to product marketing manager to product marketing director and vice president of product marketing and vice president of marketing. I can empathize with today’s product marketing challenges because I have experienced them.

My Background

Following college, I landed at Oracle Corporation in Unix technical support, and then combined my Oracle experience with a UCLA MBA to land at Hewlett Packard Company. I had various roles at HP that exposed me to B2B marketing and the IT sales process.

My cybersecurity journey started at Trend Micro, where I started off leading field marketing in Latin America—si, hablo español!­—and ended up leading the team marketing data center security products. I subsequently gravitated to smaller startups focused on data security. I landed at Vormetic, now part of Thales, where I learned about encryption and key management technology and gained an appreciation of data security complexity. There are typically tradeoffs in different vendor approaches to meeting enterprise data security requirements, and providing information to educate on those nuances for sophisticated buyers makes the difference between vendor success and failure. I then got the startup bug and led marketing at PrivateCore—a seed round startup, acquired by Facebook—working to establish a new category that is now known as confidential computing.

Cybersecurity is always changing with a frequent risk of cybersecurity myopia. Industry analysts have helped me to understand the big picture and industry trends.

Opportunity came knocking at Nok Nok Labs, a founding member of the FIDO—Fast IDentity Online— Alliance, where I learned about identity and access management (IAM) met many of the “identerati,” the experts and thought leaders that share and define the way we manage identities online. My tenure was during the early days of FIDO; it is gratifying to see how passwordless authentication has grown and passkeys are taking off.

My product marketing journey also took a plunge into the managed detection and response (MDR) space, where I was part of the product marketing team Arctic Wolf Networks, and I subsequently landed at ReliaQuest, where I was responsible for product marketing around the core ReliaQuest GreyMatter security operations platform. While the MDR managed security service provider (MSSP) space was growing exponentially, all vendors were challenged in overcoming market confusion and navigating the hodgepodge of terms describing the space—MDR, MSSP, SOC as a service, managed XDR, co-managed SIEM, and so forth.

Value From Industry Analysts

I have briefed industry analysts throughout my journey as I established and tuned my messaging, educated the market, and helped drive demand. The analyst community provides an essential perspective for both vendors and enterprises that consume vendor products. Cybersecurity is always changing with a frequent risk of cybersecurity myopia. Industry analysts have helped me to understand the big picture and industry trends. They also helped me to optimize my message and skate to where the hockey puck was going—h/t to Wayne Gretsky.

The analyst community has also helped me educate the market and generate demand for my products; enterprise customers want the insightful and credible research that analysts produce so they can understand trends, see what their peers are doing, and make informed technology decisions.

The Move to ESG

TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group analysts have distinguished themselves with exceptional and discerning research and commentary. In my experience, they have represented the gold standard in what industry analysts can provide. Enterprise Strategy Group’s acquisition by TechTarget further increases their reach and influence, delivering useful research to buyers who are considering solutions. I’m very proud to join a stellar team.

I am excited to land as an industry analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group because it allows me to analyze the industry big picture. Working for a vendor requires you to dive deeply into your technology and the market, but you are seeing your slice of the market. Analysts have the opportunity to talk to all of the vendors and understand what is happening at a macro level.

While change is endemic to cybersecurity, I also found painful inertia in the marketplace. A regular occurrence when reading sales win/loss reports was seeing “decision postponed” as the most frequent reason for losing a deal. The biggest marketplace competitor at every place I worked was inertia. My frustration button lights up when reading news headlines about this data breach or that compliance fine knowing that there are solid solutions in the market that could have avoided catastrophe. The analyst research that Enterprise Strategy Group produces helps inform the market and facilitate change and improvement.

My coverage area at Enterprise Strategy Group is IAM and data security, both of which are undergoing incredible change as data proliferates and identities evolve. Exploring concepts such as identity as the new perimeter, zero-trust architectures, identity threat detection and response, privacy and data sovereignty, data security posture management, and applying generative AI across IAM and data security are a few of the reasons why my coverage area is particularly exciting. I am looking forward to reconnecting with old acquaintances and making new ones. If you are an innovator in IAM or data security, I want to understand what you are doing! You can reach me on LinkedIn or send an email to todd.thiemann@esg-global.com.

The post Catalyzing Change: From Vendor Marketing to ESG Analyst appeared first on Enterprise Strategy Group.

This is not an obligatory AI-washing announcement, as many vendors feel they must keep making these days. In contrast, Gaia uses AI to maximize the return on your secondary data assets.

In 2019, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group introduced a maturity model that predicted the evolution of the traditional backup market into the data intelligence market, including the use of automation and AI/ML. In the model, we identified that the requirement for context and content about the data is becoming more acute as new regulations and the need for data to support digital transformation change the role of data in the enterprise. People, processes, and workflows must use data more intelligently. It’s really about business outcomes and the notion of data as a true asset that can be leveraged to create a return on investment or avoid costs and risks. Our model identified the critical role of AI/ML in reaching data management nirvana. 

That’s what Gaia delivers in many ways, but there is more than meets the eye.

Why? It uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to give end users conversational and context-rich responses to gain insights from their secondary enterprise data.

Cohesity’s new tool combines a conversational interface, AI-powered search—on indexed enterprise secondary data—and LLM response. It is designed to help organizations improve their decision-making speed and accuracy while securely searching enterprise data in a compliant fashion. Key features include natural language queries, role-based access, RAG capabilities, and a SaaS-based platform.

The use case Cohesity is putting forward relates to investigative compliance research, such as detecting violations of personally identifiable information exposures—in other words, searching data from your backups for compliance issues. It is easy to imagine adding outside data to identify the penalties or other requirements associated with this internal data. The key is that this happens securely as “your” data is never exposed externally but can be augmented by or augment external data.

Our initial view, with the caveat that our research firm has not functionally or technically validated the solution, is that Gaia is a timely platform that extends Cohesity’s capabilities, making it faster, more automated, and more efficient. Its AI assistant prioritizes privacy, risk mitigation, data protection, and security. 

It is designed to change end users’ ability to unlock value in their company’s data assets without a Ph.D. in data science.

We see the platform’s user-friendly interface and expandable ecosystem as critical to allow for external data integration and complex tasks to be performed with ease. It’s an ideal solution for enterprises seeking to maintain regulatory compliance, and its simple question-and-answer feature makes it an efficient tool for additional business and technical processes in time. 

While it might be a little early to say with Gaia, one of the significant benefits of using generative AI for conversational search on enterprise data is its ability to deliver a personalized experience. Every person accessing the data will ask different questions, and it’s impossible to predict them all. For instance, someone could ask about compliance while another group asks about security. The variety of questions presents an exciting opportunity for Cohesity to provide a comprehensive, context-rich and tailored solution to its users.

Beyond the compliance use case, we expect Cohesity to deliver what we call “generative data protection” capabilities through Gaia, focusing on cyber resilience and cyber recovery. These are inherently more complex than simply discovering data misuse or ineffective data governance policies, but they are also well-known territory for Cohesity’s platform.

Also, we appreciated how Cohesity showed some transparency in the pricing model, and organizations will need guidance based on what they expect from their user base. There will likely be a gradual process as they navigate this, with limitations based on the number of answers and the amount of storage indexed. Monitoring this pricing model is crucial, as it may set the stage for the entire market.

We believe that Cohesity has an excellent opportunity to establish itself as a leader in the market with this announcement, as it is capacity- and answer-based. Over time, the number of answers and capacity will likely determine the subscription price or pricing structure.

While it might seem like the result of years of work in intelligent data management of non-production/backup data for Cohesity, it’s just the beginning of the next phase of their technological evolution. This new phase involves integrating technologies with a broad ecosystem of cyber and AI partners and the elephant in the room: Veritas. This will happen when the acquisition deal closes in the next few quarters. With this in mind, Cohesity must execute on all fronts to ensure the continued success of Gaia and the future “new” Cohesity. 

Competitors are constantly working on their AI-focused initiatives, so Cohesity cannot afford to stand still. The year 2024 is sure to be an exciting year for the company and the market at large.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.

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In recent research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, we found that 62% of line-of-business stakeholders said they only somewhat trust their organization’s data, while 79% of organizations said they must use AI in mission-critical processes to better compete. This disparity between needing AI and trusting data needs to close quickly. We found that most organizations are heavily focused on data quality as part of data governance to gain trust and to deliver decision-making ready data to decision-empowered employees.

The Informatica CDAM represents a path toward achieving these goals. With data becoming increasingly pivotal in driving business outcomes, it has become imperative for organizations to have robust governance mechanisms in place. CDAM catalyzes innovation, providing a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities to empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data while ensuring security, privacy, and compliance.

At the heart of CDAM lies CLAIRE® AI engine, Informatica’s proprietary technology designed to harness the power of artificial intelligence for data management tasks. Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, CLAIRE empowers organizations to automate and streamline critical aspects of data governance, from classification and discovery to access control and policy enforcement. By integrating AI-driven capabilities into the fabric of IDMC, CDAM enables organizations to accelerate their journey toward data-driven decision-making. With automated, policy-based security and privacy controls driven by metadata intelligence, businesses can deploy new analytics and AI use cases, knowing that their data assets are safeguarded against unauthorized access and misuse. This is an excellent example of unleashing the power of AI in data governance.

The need for scalable data access management has also become increasingly urgent in today’s fast-paced, data-driven world. With the proliferation of advanced analytics and AI technologies, organizations are grappling with the challenge of ensuring secure and compliant data access while also driving innovation and unlocking new growth opportunities.

CDAM is poised to address the AI governance challenge head-on, providing organizations with the tools and capabilities they need to accelerate innovation on a foundation of AI-powered data governance. By automating and enforcing data access controls across their data estates, businesses can experience the full potential of their data assets, driving insights, innovation, and competitive advantage. At its core, CDAM is about empowering organizations to harness the full power of their data assets. By democratizing access to data and enabling self-service analytics, CDAM enables organizations to unlock new insights, drive innovation, and fuel growth. With CDAM, businesses can easily navigate the complex landscape of data governance, knowing that their data assets are secure, compliant, and ready to power the next wave of innovation. Anyone looking for an end-to-end data platform with strong governance should consider Informatica.

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Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Decoding the Data Universe: The State of Data Science and Machine Learning, February 2024.

Organizations continue to hone their strategic focus on data-driven decision-making, in turn driving widespread deployment of data science and ML initiatives. However, numerous challenges can prevent the successful integration of data into models and overall organizational strategies and mindsets. The inherent complexity of data science and ML initiatives fuels a rising need for improved agility, efficiency, and performance, along with well-planned risk reduction and compliance measures. Rapidly evolving strategies increasingly reflect a highly diverse data science ecosystem.

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Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, 2024 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, February 2024.

While macroeconomic conditions have improved over the last several months, many businesses are still taking a cautious approach to spending. However, for many organizations, this is not an option when it comes to technology investments that underpin digital transformation efforts and increasingly serve as competitive differentiators. With this in mind, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 938 senior IT and business decision-makers to ascertain IT budget outlooks for 2024, both overall and for specific technologies, and to determine the key business and technology priorities driving these spending plans.

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Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, A Network Perspective on SASE and SD-WAN, November 2023.

The level of interest in secure access service edge (SASE) architectures has exploded recently as organizations struggle to use traditional, on-premises-based network and security solutions to support distributed, cloud-centric enterprise environments. While this has been an increasing challenge over the last few years, the pandemic and resulting spike in newly remote workers pushed many organizations to a tipping point when it comes to both security and network traffic. Additionally, the broad applicability of SASE leads to some confusion on where to begin and which technologies are required, exacerbated by legacy organizational dynamics. While Enterprise Strategy Group has seen SASE elevated to a CIO/CISO-led initiative in some cases, inconsistencies remain for many organizations in day-to-day collaboration across network and security teams.

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Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Endpoint Device Trends: Evaluating a Shifting Desktop and Laptop Procurement Management, OS, Feature, Application, and Spending Landscape, February 2024.

Whether using traditional PCs or laptops, workstations, Macs, Chromebooks, or virtual desktops and applications, the endpoint device is the first link in the chain that connects a user to their work. In today’s typical corporate environment, IT organizations are tasked with supporting multiple endpoint devices per user across a range of hardware form factors and operating systems. Each device or OS type requires additional considerations for purchasing, deployment, management, and security. Acquisition, deployment, and ongoing management efforts are affected by this sprawl, with models often including thin clients, BYOD programs, unmanaged (zero-trust) devices, and corporate-managed devices.

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In order to investigate how organizations are connecting to multiple public cloud providers, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 337 IT and networking professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) familiar with their organization’s entire network environment and responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and/or operating corporate networking solutions, including data center, cloud, campus, branch, edge, WAN, and home office technology.

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Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, 2024 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, February 2024.

While macroeconomic conditions have improved over the last several months, many businesses are still taking a cautious approach to spending. However, for many organizations, this is not an option when it comes to technology investments that underpin digital transformation efforts and increasingly serve as competitive differentiators. With this in mind, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 938 senior IT and business decision-makers to ascertain IT budget outlooks for 2024, both overall and for specific technologies, and to determine the key business and technology priorities driving these spending plans.

The post Data Point of the Week appeared first on Enterprise Strategy Group.