For this episode of the Jenny Radcliffe Talk Show on ITSPmagazine, we welcome Susan Etlinger. Susan is an industry analyst at Altimeter Group. She is a globally recognized expert in digital strategy and has authored a series of reports and frameworks on topics including artificial intelligence, big data, analytics and digital ethics.

Marco and I are fortunate in that we get to hear a lot of stories. Of course, as one of our mantras spells out, we are always on the lookout for stories that are better than others. This story is that and a bit more.

What if you could have your cake and eat it too? No matter how many times you hear this, it still sounds good. Conversely, however, we can’t even remember how many conversations we’ve had over the years, about passwords and how inconvenient and old-fashioned they are—both for today’s businesses and for personal lives operating in the digital age.

In this Unusual Gatherings Talk Show, we get to talk about sharing the passion that moves people to choose a career as a cybersecurity professional, what is happening in this industry, and why collaboration at every level looks more and more like the future of cybersecurity.

What can we do as professionals and humans to ensure the best possible outcome and prevent the worst outcome?

During Black Hat, we had the chance to meet two of these individuals from Cequence Security: one is a security research veteran that has been with the company for a long time and the other a new-hire but with a long and solid history of looking after product marketing for another very well-known security brand.

Companies are comprised of people. It is the aggregation of individual stories that give character and life to the brand they represent, the products they develop, and the customer interactions they create. With this in mind, we often like to start our conversations with some personal notes about our guest; and that’s precisely how this one begins.

Sean and I connect with a former pharmaceutical IT professional and now-CEO of DataLocker, Jay Kim. While focused on IT problems, Jay found himself in the crosshairs of the Y2K phenomenon and got a real taste for what the “A” meant in the information security CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability). As a consequence of his choice to be in IT, Jay found himself on a business trip where he met an engineer with a novel idea about manufacturing secure external hard drives.

We’ve had a number of Their Story conversations with the team at Juniper Networks over the years; many of them happened to be with our good friend Mounir Hahad. We were happy to have the opportunity to sit down with him once more for another chat.

Have a listen to see if you agree with Mounir’s perspective; maybe now is a good time to double-check if you are doing everything you can when it comes to protecting your systems and data across the infrastructure you’ve deployed for your business.

As it often happens, when we do not know who the author is for an excellent wisdom quote, we attribute to Confucius. This quote below doesn't belong to him either, but we certainly cannot deny the value and truth that comes with it:

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."