Tenable Blog

“When data gets really big, really massive scale, it becomes really hard to secure, because you’re talking about breaking down a lot of assumptions we used to have.

The night before the launch of the 2015 RSA Conference in San Francisco, I attended the Tenable ISE VIP Welcome Reception with T.E.N. and asked attendees, “If your CEO asks, ‘How secure are we?’ what do you say?”

It’s an apparently simple question, yet loaded, extremely difficult to answer, important to the business, and your answer may never satisfy you or the CEO. With so much packed into one simple question, could these extremely smart and talented security professionals handle the challenge? Watch.

“Running security five years ago was much more difficult than it is today,” said Alex Hutton (@alexhutton), faculty at IANS, in our conversation at the 2015 Security B-Sides conference in San Francisco.

For years, Hutton said, security people would complain, “The board isn’t taking us seriously. I’m not getting the visibility that I need.”

Prior to DevOps (the continuous operational merger between developers and IT operations), we were trying to do security within our system of constraints and incentive structures, thus forcing it upon people's priority lists.