Hosted By: Digital Transformation

Perimeter-centric and hardware-based IT environments are rapidly moving to multi-cloud environments where data seamlessly moves between traditional physical infrastructures, virtualized data centers, and the cloud, and most companies are blind from an internal security perspective. Security models that don’t sufficiently address workload and application-aware segmentation, lateral traffic visibility, and network-based threat detection leave a huge gap in an organization's overall security posture. Add to this picture that spending on the internet of Things is predicted to reach $1.29T by 2020.

Critical infrastructure companies that don’t think they’re big enough, important enough, or valuable enough to be concerned about the cloud and IoT simply aren’t paying attention. Gartner says that 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer's fault, not the provider. These challenges are difficult in traditional IT environments; but in more robust critical infrastructure industries like electricity, oil and gas, water, transportation, and manufacturing, where availability of systems is more important than integrity and confidentiality of data, establishing effective security controls and monitoring of non-traditional protocols in highly available environments is critical. 

This talk will explore how the cloud and IoT technologies are impacting traditional critical infrastructure industries and why security needs to be central to the conversation.

Speaker:
Mark Weatherford, vArmour

Mark Weatherford has more than 20 years of security operations leadership and executive-level policy experience in some of the most important organizations in the world. Weatherford is focused on helping customers meet the evolving security needs of the cloud and 21st century data centers, while expanding vArmour’s global customer base across all industries in the government and commercial markets. Mark’s past experience includes his role as a principal at The Chertoff Group (he still remains a senior advisor), where he worked with organizations around the world to understand corporate cyber risk and develop strategic enterprise security solutions. In 2011, President Obama appointed Weatherford as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) first deputy under secretary for cybersecurity for a two-year period. Before DHS, he was the vice president and chief security officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Prior to NERC, he was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to serve as California’s first chief information security officer (CISO) and was also the first CISO for the State of Colorado, where two successive governors appointed him. A former cryptologist in the U.S. Navy, Weatherford led the Navy’s Computer Network Defense Operations and the Naval Computer Incident Response Team.