Tenable Blog

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.

Some people are calling this week a Cyber Legislation Week. As the entire cybersecurity industry starts making its annual pilgrimage to the foggy city on the bay where they will spend several days inside a conference hall talking about or listening to nothing but information security, our elected officials on the other side of the country will attempt to capitalize on all of that RSA conference excitement by moving forward on several pieces of legislation on cybersecurity.