“Breaches are inevitable”: Illumio channel chiefs on changing mindsets around cyber breaches

Todd Palmer and Tim Fulton at Illumio speak to CRN Australia about how leaders need to rethink their stance on cybersecurity.

As the cyber landscape changes daily, companies need to change their mindset around cyber breaches.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Todd Palmer, SVP global partner sales and alliances at Illumio said, “Regulatory requirements aside, companies need to start changing their mindset, from a breach is bad, to breaches are inevitable. We need to focus on resilience.

“You're going to have a breach. How do you make sure that you can contain it, and it's not catastrophic. That's a mindset change.”

Illumio is a cybersecurity vendor that focuses on breach containment, zero trust security, and micro segmentation solutions for cloud and data centre environments.

Palmer said those executives spending money on preventative-based technologies need a mindset shift.

"They have to have a mindset change on it's going to happen. What do I do once it happens? To make sure that it doesn't do any harm to my organisation, that's a big shift, cultural shift within most of the customers that we do business with,” he said.

Tim Fulton, APAC director of channels, Illumio noted that organisations are beginning to do things differently around creating cyber resilience.

“I think for a long time there's been an undercurrent of innovation, but not a sort of step change in the way that people start thinking about how they can apply the technology,” he said.

“We're now at one of those transition points where those organisations that embrace that change and get ahead of that curve will really benefit from it.

"The cost of building those big firewalls, compared to going let's take a step back and think about doing this in a slightly different way. I think those organisations are going to really benefit from that.”

Fulton added that those partners who are willing to go against the grain and think about things in a different way will benefit.

“Maybe [AI] is the oil to start greasing the wheels to make this, make this happen, because organisations realise that they need to do things differently, otherwise they're not going to keep up,” he said.

Education

In terms of educating their partners around their product and the cybersecurity market, Palmer explained that some partners understand cyber and others aren’t there yet.

"We had a meeting where the company's been pushing promoting segmentation for 10 years,” he said.

“Then ones that they might have a large, established security practice, they do a ton of business with the endpoint security providers, the firewall providers and the cloud security providers, but segmentation hadn't been a part of it, they know now it needs to be.

“A lot of the questions are, ‘I know how important it is, help train my teams on how to where it fits, and how do I push, promote this and help my customers with it’. There's very few security integrators that aren't investing in building out a segmentation expertise now,” he added.