It's that time of year again so I took some time to reflect back on 2018 and what we can expect to ring true in 2019. I've boiled it down to two predictions. The first takes an introspective view into the organizations we're all ultimately tasked with protecting. The second takes an outward-facing view that acknowledges that enterprises are part of a broader business ecosystem, and with that comes upstream and downstream risk. 

In this post, I explain the various factors in calculating the Illumio Vulnerability Exposure Score (VES), which allows organizations to combine industry-standard vulnerability scoring measurements with context from their own unique environment. The VES also helps security professionals prioritize security controls to minimize the exposure of the attack surface and potential impact of vulnerabilities.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com. Read part one of the series here. 

In part one of this two-part series, I talked about the similarities between protecting high-value assets in public spaces in the real world and in the enterprise. This includes the need to understand the value of the assets, how to reduce available pathways to the assets to minimize the potential attack surface and use security controls on the access points.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

The best security professionals are those that can think like a hacker. Their perspective on defense is based on a fundamental understanding of how to scour a system for weaknesses that can be easily exploited. Are there obscure entry points that aren’t secured? All it takes is one overlooked device with default passwords connected to the outside world and attackers are in, despite all the resources dedicated to protecting the main entry.

In my role, I spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about technology trends, with a sharp focus on how security is reaching limits and breaking. This is what drives me as we build products to address market requirements. The whole reason Illumio exists is because I saw that firewalls are reaching limits and needed to be rethought in the age of the cloud. 

As is tradition this time of year, I took some time to think about what has changed in 2017 and what that means for the year ahead. Some of the predictions are grounded in the reality of what's transpired and what we have learned, while others are more speculative and educated guesses based on the data we have.