If You Love Cloud Misconfigurations So Much, Why Don't You Marry Them!
episodePreviously titled “If You Like Cloud Misconfigurations So Much, Why Don't You Marry Them!” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Best advice I ever got in security. Go.
The best advice I've ever received in security is that complexity is a vulnerability.
What is the best advice for security professionals?
It's time to begin the CISO Series podcast.
Welcome to the CISO Series Podcast. My name is David Spark. I am the producer of said CISO Series and joining us as our co-host, you know him very well. It is the principal over at DUHA, Andy Ellis. Andy, say hello to the audience. Hello to the audience. There you go.
I thought I'd try something new today.
It's like the classic line of walk this way and then they all sort of walk in the same silly motion. It's an old, old gag. We are available at CISOseries.com where you can check out all of our other wonderful programming. We have four other shows on our network. Go discover them. No need to explain now. Our sponsor for today's episode is Native, the cloud security control plane for the enterprise. And guess what? We're going to be talking a lot about cloud security on this show. And in fact, they're responsible for today's guest, who I will introduce in just a second. But Andy, something unique just happened. You and I just got back from RSA and we both within an hour just published our summaries of the event.
Yours was different than mine. Give us a quick synopsis of what your post was about, which, by the way, the volume you did was insane.
Yeah. Yep. So I did walk the entire show floor, recorded 607 exhibitors. That's a lot. And wrote the state of security vendors, which was my impressions as a buyer who also does marketing of what marketers think they're selling, who's in what spaces, given a view towards like, where's the money coming from for VCs? You know, where are they actually sort of investing in? To sort of get this overarching view of what's going on, I got to say about 10% of the vendors had zero messaging on their booths at all. No idea what they did. I mean, I knew some of their names, but it was kind of crazy how many couldn't tell what they did from what was on their booth.
Well, so this is a conversation and people listen to show may have heard me say this before. I remember I was walking the floor with Adam Click, who is a CISO himself. And I just said, look at all those names out there. What percentage would you say you know what they do? And just shooting from the hip, he said, like, maybe 25 percent, which may actually I think could be high.
But think about this. Yeah, so my 10% is there's no hint at all as to what they do. No, no, I get that. But 37% said they did AI security, and I still don't know what that means.
Right, but the reason I bring this up is... This says a lot about just the industry of security, that if you're talking with some of the smartest people in the industry who should be in the know, and at the most, by the way, I've asked this question of many CISOs, and the highest number I ever get is 25%, which again is shooting from the hip. I know if we actually put them to the task, it'd be a different story. But if the smartest people in the industry have a 25% clue of what's going on in the market, That is a mess because I'm thinking about, think about it in any other industry like automotive or health or something. I can't imagine the smartest people have a 25% clue of what's going on.
So I think that you're asking the wrong question because I do agree we have a problem, but that number isn't the indicator. What is the indicator? Imagine if you went to an automobile show that was aimed at the manufacturers, not at consumers. So it is every sub in the entire industry. Yeah, if you walked in and said to some random car designer, how many of those vendors do you know what they do a priori, they're going to tell you 25%. The market is massive. No, I think it would be much higher, I argued. No, because if you work for Ford, you know all of Ford's subs, but you don't know all of Toyota's subs. And so you don't necessarily know, like the person who makes the fiber optic channels for Toyota might not be your vendor.
So you might not know who they are. And there's a lot of little vendors at RSA.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:12
2
What is the best advice for security professionals?
0:12–4:19
3
How do complexity and misconfigurations impact cloud security?
4:19–9:50
4
What does 'secure by design' mean in cloud environments?
9:50–20:28
5
How can CISOs empower their teams to operate independently?
20:28–40:08
Speakers
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