Cylake is building its cybersecurity platform with direct input from the organizations it is being designed to serve.

In the fifth episode of Inside Cybersecurity, René Bonvanie sits down with Nick Campagna, Vice President of Product Management at Cylake, to go inside Cylake’s Design Partner program and discuss what the team is learning as it works with security and technology leaders across critical infrastructure, healthcare, financial services, service providers, manufacturing, and other complex environments.

Design partners are brought into the development process early. They walk the Cylake team through their environments, technology stacks, operational processes, and security requirements. As development progresses, they provide feedback on everything from interactive product mockups to beta versions of the system.

Those conversations are already surfacing common cybersecurity problems.

Legacy security stacks can make it difficult to see an attack across an organization’s entire environment. Static detection rules cannot anticipate every attack technique. And in highly regulated and operationally sensitive environments, decisions about AI, hardware, data residency, and cloud connectivity come with constraints that cannot be treated as an afterthought.

The conversations are shaping the product in more specific ways, too. Nick describes how multiple design partners independently raised the importance of business context in security operations: understanding not just that an asset is behaving suspiciously, but what that asset does for the organization before deciding how to respond.

For Cylake, that is the point of the program. Design partners aren’t shown a finished product and asked whether they like it. They are actively helping shape how the platform works before commercial launch.

Nick:Everybody’s concerned about tokens because they understand that GenAI is an important part of cybersecurity going forward. When that GenAI runs on a frontier model in a public cloud, you know you’re going to pay for it. And folks are concerned they’ll have to make a choice. They’ll get to six months into the year and then run out of tokens. And then what? Go back to the old way of doing things?

René:Probably be earlier than six months, maybe. Pony up and pay more.

Nick:But when you run those LLM capabilities on your own hardware, there are no token costs, right? You know, you’ve got all the power that you need on the appliances themselves.

René:I love it when I see that sparkle in your eye when we talk about hardware because, you know, we’ve done this before, right? But this is a whole different ball game. This is a completely vertically integrated stack. And that hasn’t been done for a long, long time. And this is the team to go do it.

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In the fourth episode of Inside Cybersecurity, Cylake founder and CEO Nir Zuk sits down with Joel Fishbein, Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Securities, to discuss a question that is becoming increasingly important for large organizations: who actually controls their cybersecurity data?

Joel brings a distinct perspective to the conversation. Before joining Guggenheim’s Investment Banking team, he spent 25 years as a sell-side research analyst covering cybersecurity and infrastructure software, following more than 100 public companies and participating in over 75 equity transactions across the sector.

The conversation explores why cybersecurity has become increasingly dependent on fragmented data architectures, why different security functions need access to the same complete data set, and why cloud economics can force vendors to make architectural tradeoffs that ultimately affect customers.

Nir and Joel also examine the growing importance of data sovereignty. For air-gapped environments, critical infrastructure, regulated institutions, and organizations operating across geopolitical boundaries, where data resides—and who ultimately controls it—is becoming an architectural requirement rather than simply a compliance consideration.

The discussion also looks at why moving large volumes of data between cloud providers can be difficult and expensive, why some organizations are reconsidering on-premises infrastructure, and what it takes to build a cybersecurity platform around a single ingestion pipeline and unified data foundation.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in cybersecurity, the conversation returns to a foundational issue: AI, automation, and security applications can only work with the data they can access.

Nir Zuk:More and more customers find out that when they try to move from one cloud vendor to another cloud vendor, it’s very hard for them to move the data with them.

Vendors are giving them a very, very hard time, and they’re charging enormous amounts of money for moving the data from one vendor to another.

When you run on premises, and in the case of Cylake it will be based on an Apache stack, it’s your data. It’s in an open format. Do whatever you want with it.

Joel Fishbein:It should be your data, right?

Nir Zuk:It should be your data.

At the end of the day, in the cloud, it’s not. Read the end-user license agreement. It’s never your data.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cylake.substack.com

In this episode of Inside Cybersecurity, former Palo Alto Networks CEO and Chairman Mark McLaughlin joins René Bonvanie to discuss how cybersecurity has moved from a CISO issue to a board-level responsibility.

The conversation explores how boards should evaluate cyber maturity, why AI is changing the economics and scale of attacks, and why organizations need to understand how much of their security response still depends on human intervention. Mark also discusses the growing importance of resilience, digital sovereignty, and control as geopolitical fragmentation reshapes how governments and large enterprises think about critical data.

Mark draws on his experience leading Palo Alto Networks, serving on the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and advising companies at the board level to explain why cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a problem that can be solved once and set aside.

This episode of Inside Cybersecurity examines the strategic questions boards, CEOs, and security leaders should be asking as AI, regulation, and geopolitical pressure change the operating environment.

Mark McLaughlin:

You don’t have to solve cyber. I don’t think it is a completely solvable thing. But if you can be better at cyber than your nearest competitor, that is a competitive advantage.

Another way to look at it is: can I be as good as I can be, and better than the competition? Because now cyber can be a strategic advantage. It can be a selling advantage.

Some of the best CISOs I have worked with understand that their job is not only to protect the organization. It is also to translate that work for the CEO and the go-to-market organization and say: we are good at this, and we should let people know that, because customers care about their data, privacy, and security.

René Bonvanie:

A lot has been said about the role of AI. Is it giving boards and executives more hope, or more fear?

Mark McLaughlin:

It is still very early. Some security leaders have treated AI as another application and said, we have been securing applications for a long time, so we will allow it or block it.

But that is changing quickly. Organizations are starting to understand that they lack visibility. After that, they are also lacking the ability to apply granular control.

What you want to do is harness AI and make it productive, but do it securely. The question is whether your infrastructure and systems allow you to do that. Right now, the answer is: not really.

The number of attacks is going to continue to rise, and AI has made it possible to launch sophisticated attacks at very low cost. The question is how many of those attacks can be handled without a human.

If humans remain the primary resource, organizations will always fall behind. AI has made that problem more acute, but it also creates the opportunity to bring machines to the defense.

We now have algorithms fighting algorithms. Organizations need to lean into that.

René Bonvanie:

What should boards ask their security leaders?

Mark McLaughlin:

Ask one question every quarter: how many attacks did we see, and how many required human involvement?

If the human ratio is not stable or declining, that tells you where to focus. If it is increasing, the organization may not fully understand the problem, much less the solution.

The second question is how the security team views AI. If the answer is simply that AI is another application, I would be skeptical.

René Bonvanie:

We are also hearing more about digital sovereignty. Why is that becoming more important?

Mark McLaughlin:

Five years ago, sovereignty was discussed primarily in the context of privacy. Today, it means something broader.

The question is whether an organization or a nation knows where its data is, how it is being used, and what level of control it has over that data.

In AI, the leading question is who gets to use your data for training. Do you know it is happening? Do you have any say in it?

Sovereignty now involves architecture, privacy, national policy, and security. Ultimately, it comes down to control.

Geopolitical polarization is also likely to push nation-states and major enterprises toward greater control over critical data. The period of assuming complete globalization is over.

Governments and large multinational organizations will increasingly try to control where their data sits, how it is processed, and which infrastructure it depends on. We are already seeing that in regulation and data center investment, and we are likely to see more of it.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cylake.substack.com

In the second episode of Inside Cybersecurity, Cylake founder and CEO Nir Zuk joins René Bonvanie to discuss one of the biggest misconceptions shaping cybersecurity today: the belief that AI itself is the solution.

While much of the industry is focused on AI agents, copilots, and automation, Nir argues that the real challenge lies elsewhere. AI is only as effective as the data it can access, and most cybersecurity platforms were never designed to provide the complete visibility modern AI systems require.

The conversation explores the differences between machine learning and generative AI, why attackers and defenders are adopting AI in fundamentally different ways, and how fragmented data architectures continue to limit what security teams can accomplish. Nir also explains why organizations chasing the latest AI capabilities may be overlooking a more foundational problem: incomplete data leads to incomplete security outcomes.

As AI becomes increasingly central to cybersecurity, the discussion shifts from what AI can do to what it needs in order to work.

This is the second episode of Inside Cybersecurity, a series exploring the architectural shifts reshaping cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, security operations, and data governance for large enterprises and regulated institutions.

Nir Zuk:

Let’s say you build a machine learning pipeline. That’s not too difficult to do. Who is going to write the thousands of machine learning models that you need?

And then policy and all that stuff. You’ll basically have to do what Cylake is doing, which is rebuild the entire cybersecurity stack on top of your custom data pipeline and your custom on-prem data lake.

We’re going to spend $100 million doing it. You’ll probably have to spend $100 million doing it too. You’ll do it for yourself. We’ll do it for enough customers to justify the investment.

René Bonvanie:

Exactly.

Nir Zuk:

I understand the frustration. Customers are disappointed with existing solutions. But the answer isn’t trying to rebuild the entire cybersecurity stack yourself.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe for free to stay up to date with Inside Cybersecurity by Cylake.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cylake.substack.com

Cylake is building cybersecurity for the world’s largest and most regulated organizations operating at data scale.

Founded by the team behind category-defining security companies, Cylake is focused on the challenges that emerge when fragmented tools, partial visibility, and disconnected data stop scaling in complex environments.

This channel features conversations with the builders, operators, and security leaders shaping the future of cybersecurity — including discussions on data, sovereignty, AI, operational resilience, and security architecture in regulated environments.

Our mission is to support organizations and enterprises that need sovereign, complete, and transparent agentic protection against cyberattacks.

For more information, visit cylake.com.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cylake.substack.com