The Future of Cyber Resilience—Enfuse On Air 2020

The Future of Cyber Resilience – Click Here to View the Keynote OpenText’s 20th annual Enfuse conference—the cybersecurity and digital investigations event of the year—has…

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Mark J. Barrenechea

December 4, 20208 minutes read

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The Future of Cyber Resilience Keynote Illustration

The Future of Cyber Resilience – Click Here to View the Keynote

OpenText’s 20th annual Enfuse conference—the cybersecurity and digital investigations event of the year—has just come to an end.

The incredible four-week on-air conference series brought together cybersecurity leaders from around the world to share knowledge about the latest trends and technologies that are rapidly changing not only the landscape of security, investigation and recovery, but the very nature of the digital world itself.

With over 1,500 attendees, five fantastic keynotes, 28 sessions, practical hands-on labs and much more, Enfuse On Air 2020 was the hub for security professionals—from digital investigators to IT to CISOs—to gain new insights into how to solve today’s cybersecurity challenges, engage with peers and industry leaders, and develop their skills. We also had amazing interviews with customers who gave us their unique perspectives, including Katie Arrington, CISO at Department of Defense; Kirk Arthur, Senior Director, Business Development, Worldwide Public Safety and Justice at Microsoft; David Kinzer, Senior Manager of eDiscovery, InfoSec at Walmart; and Jay C. Grant, Director of IT Security at Webcor Builders.

Enfuse On Air 2020 Stats and Speakers

Enfuse On Air 2020

In addition to my own keynote, we heard from fascinating speakers and leaders who shared their expertise and knowledge to educate and inspire attendees.

General Nadja West, the 44th Army Surgeon General and the former Commanding General of US Army Medical Command, gave an excellent keynote about leading through uncertainty—certainly a pertinent topic in today’s world! Grounded in her many years of experience in the army, General West reminded us that the difficulties we face are opportunities to be brave, build resilience, and lead with empathy and respect.

Tarah Wheeler, cybersecurity leader, author and entrepreneur, discussed the distinct challenges for professionals in the cybersecurity space and spoke candidly about what it is like to be on the frontlines of a cyberwar that can often seem invisible to the world at large. She gave a number of practical insights, including ways to avoid burnout and a call to always be innovating.

Muhi Majzoub, EVP and Chief Product Officer at OpenText, spoke to attendees in detail about our new Security & Protection Cloud, which combines the capabilities of Webroot, Carbonite, BrightCloud and EnCase in one comprehensive cybersecurity and resilience platform. His talk also featured demos, showcasing OpenText technology in action to investigate off-VPN endpoints and to conduct fast, in-depth threat detection and response.

Craig Stilwell, EVP, SMB and Consumer, Cyber Resilience at OpenText and Hal Lonas, SVP and CTO, SMB and Consumer at OpenText, together gave a keynote which outlined the growing challenges for SMBs and MSPs, why “digital fitness” is more important than ever, and how OpenText’s technology is in a unique position to provide the multilayered security that businesses need today. They discussed the OpenText cybersecurity product vision, as well as key product principles, such as being cloud-based, integrated and easy to manage.

At Enfuse, OpenText also introduced an exciting new partnership with Microsoft Azure. OpenText EnCase digital investigation solutions are now certified on Microsoft Azure, helping investigators more easily collaborate, process evidence, adjust to a remote workforce and work in the cloud.

Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow

In my keynote, The Future of Cyber Resilience, I discussed the incredible changes I have seen in 2020 and how this remarkable, pivotal year will set the stage for the years to come. In fact, I suspect 2021 will be just as remarkable, as humanity meets our new world head-on.

And it is not hyperbolic to say that 2020 has landed us in a new world. It is a new equilibrium. COVID-19 has changed everything, driving a significant acceleration of technological disruption (on top of the already-monumental disruptions wrought by Industry 4.0) and profound changes to the ways we work, live, shop and experience our lives.

Work-from-anywhere will be a permanent part of our reality moving forward. Direct-to-consumer erupted and will never be put back in the box. Contactless retail and social commerce are now intrinsic to the customer experience. New supply chains will emerge. Time to Value has gained an immediacy that is here to stay.

All of this has catalyzed a “Great Rethink” across all dimensions of human existence: economic, environmental, individual, geopolitical and everything in between. We now live, permanently, in two worlds—the virtual and the physical. The Great Rethink is our opportunity to shape both of these worlds in the new equilibrium, now and in the future.

The virtual and the physical are coming together—but underpinning it all, we need trust and protection. Without it, these two worlds fail.

Consider the top worldwide risks from the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report. For the past two years, the top five risks were split into two key areas—environmental and technological. Physical and virtual.

WEF - Top Global Risks

World Economic Forum – Top Five Global Risks

Already, security challenges were increasing year over year—now, just as COVID-19 has vaulted technological disruption into the future by leaps and bounds, so too has cyber risk advanced. A greater share of work must be done virtually, at the same time expanding the attack surface and making business continuity even more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Endpoints have exploded. Widespread work-from-home means employees are working on less secure home networks, often using personal devices. The notion of a defensible “perimeter” has been obliterated. Meanwhile, companies are increasingly relying on third parties, giving them data, credentials and access—but not all third parties are created equal.

Cybercriminals are taking advantage. The numbers are staggering. Cyberattacks increased five times over during the pandemic. The average ransom amount rose by $100k between January and June 2020. Malicious files with “Zoom” in their name skyrocketed by 2,000%. One in fifty new COVID-19 websites are fraudulent, designed to scam.

The need for cyber resilience has never been greater.

Cybersecurity Stats 2020

Cyberattacks in 2020

On top of this, security, privacy, governance and compliance are slamming together. Organizations must contend with over 100,000 rules, standards and regulations around the world.

Global Regulatory Environment

Global Governance Landscape

We have left the previous equilibrium behind. The new world must be built on a platform of trust and protection.

This is how we have been operating at OpenText. This is what drives our mindset and our agenda.

The OpenText Cyber Resilience Strategy

OpenText’s roadmap forward is centered on our five pillars and our five principles, working in tandem.

OpenText 5 Pillars and 5 Principles

OpenText Five Pillars and Five Principles

Security and cyber resilience underpin all other pillars and principles. Upon this strong foundation, our comprehensive platform of trust empowers Information Management in the cloud and on the edge, driven by APIs and services, and layered with data and AI capabilities.

We believe in the power of “and.” Today it is cloud AND edge. No edge, no cloud; no cloud, no edge. We are all working in the cloud and on the edge. The first tenet of our cyber resilience strategy is recognizing this unassailable truth. Then, we can secure humans, information and machines regardless of the perimeter (which is disappearing or already gone).

Bad actors have access to the same technology as everyone else and are constantly evolving their strategies. That means we need to be smart enough to protect not only against known threats, but also unknown threats—with speed and accuracy. With the help of machines, like OpenText’s BrightCloud threat intelligence technology, we can think at the speed of light to find and confront unknown threats as they emerge.

However, when things go wrong, we will provide the tools to recover. A complete cyber resilience approach must include both the proactive and reactive toolsets that organizations need in the event of an attack, investigation or data loss.

Taken together, this creates a veil of protection for the total community—and our customers range from consumers and prosumers, to SMBs, to government and law enforcement agencies, to the enterprise.

Finally, our strategy is to do all of this on a single integrated platform, at galactic scale.

OpenText is already well on our way to achieving galactic scale, with over three exabytes under management, 250 million secured endpoints, trillions in network commerce and 22 million URLs crawled per day.

OpenText Stats

Operating at Galactic Scale

Security & Protection Cloud

Our cyber resilience strategy is put into practice through our new Security & Protection Cloud.

OpenText Security and Protection Cloud

The OpenText Security & Protection Cloud

It is the most comprehensive security and data protection platform on the market today—and every day we are expanding, integrating and innovating.

Commitment to Cyber Resilience

Our Commitment to Cyber Resilience

Over the next year, and beyond, we are committed to enhancing and enlarging our cyber resilience capabilities and empowering our diverse community of users with a platform where all of these technologies come together in a seamless unified agent. Always up-to-date. Always secure.

Click here to view my keynote on demand.

Thank You!

Cyber resilience needs to be job #1. Every organization needs to be secure and future ready, especially with new technologies like 5G and quantum on the horizon. 2020 has shown us that while we may never be able to fully predict the challenges we will face in the future, a strong foundation is the key to weathering uncertainty with agility.

Thank you for making Enfuse On Air 2020 such a great success!

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Mark J. Barrenechea

Mark J. Barrenechea joined OpenText as President and Chief Executive Officer in January 2012, and also serves as a member of the Board of Directors. In January 2016, Mark took on the role of Chief Technology Officer and was appointed Vice Chair in September 2017.

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