Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

DLT, a Tech Data subsidiary, has partnered with IBM and Microsoft to distribute advanced technology. The solutions aggregator announced on Thursday that it’s bringing IBM’s open hybrid cloud, AI, security and other software solutions, to the U.S. public sector. On Wednesday, DLT partnered with Microsoft to bring more than half-dozen Azure and Modern Workplace offers to government entities.

DLT is a premier government solutions aggregator with access to more than 50 in-house contract vehicles and dedicated channel and enablement services.

IBM’s Jay Bellisimo

“We’re seeing organizations increase their investments in hybrid cloud and AI as they accelerate their digital transformations,” said Jay Bellissimo, general manager for the U.S. public and federal market at IBM. “This collaboration with Tech Data and DLT will expand our platforms’ footprint further into the partner ecosystem and with clients in the U.S. government and education markets, which ultimately will provide them with the flexibility, security and innovation of IBM’s open hybrid cloud and AI solutions.”

Here’s a closer look at the DLT-IBM deal. DLT will extend the channel’s reach to help U.S. public sector customers’ journeys to the cloud. Through Cloud Navigator, DLT’s partner network, partners can assess cloud readiness, provide government customer cloud migration support. This will help ensure that organizations maintain visibility, gain actionable intelligence and achieve automation and accountability across their cloud investments.

Via the new agreement DLT will offer IBM Cloud Paks, containerized and integrated suites of software that run on Red Hat OpenShift and are hosted on IBM Cloud. Cloud Paks integrate with IBM Watson. In fact, DLT is authorized to offer all of IBM’s software-based solutions.

Microsoft Offers

Microsoft’s offers will also be available through DLT’s Cloud Navigator program. It will include enhanced International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)-compliant support through DLT’s Confirmed Stateside Support offering.

The Microsoft Azure and Modern Workplace solutions include: Azure Commercial Cloud, Azure Government; Azure Government Secret, Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS), Azure Software as a Service (SaaS), and Modern workplace applications such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.

DLT Solutions’ Chris Wilkinson

“Migrating workloads to the cloud is an important step on the pathway for digital transformation and IT modernization for government organizations, said Chris Wilkinson, president of DLT Solutions. “By distributing Microsoft’s Azure and Modern Workplace solutions to the U.S. public sector, DLT and our partners will be able to help these organizations accelerate their modernization goals and mission objectives with an expanded set of cloud portfolio solutions.”

Company Name: Technium
2020 Hot 101 Ranking: 83
CTO: Michael Joseph
Headquartered: Southborough, MA
Primary Services:

• Secure network as a service
• Security advisory and maintenance

Twitter: @TechniumOps

Technium, the managed networking and security provider, has nearly doubled its customer base by targeting the biotech and life sciences segment.

Co-founders Michael Joseph and Marius Janulis formed Technium in 1999. In 2012, they identified and acknowledged an industry shift toward converged networking and security. To prepare, they began investing in more security-focused partnerships, training and personnel.

As Joseph, also CTO, points out, it’s important to listen and learn. That better ensures success with customers.

Technium’s Michael Joseph

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Joseph talks about the pivot to biotech and life sciences. He also talks about the satisfaction that comes from owning your own business.

Channel Futures: What is one thing you wish vendors would do that they don’t?

Michael Joseph: This is an important question, and in fact, the answer is extremely simple: Listen. As a small business owner, we have been forced to evolve in step with our customers’ needs, which are always changing. Cloud strategies move to security challenges and then to remote access concerns. As a technology company, the needs of the customer are very important to hear and ensure that as a business we listen and learn. This means regular communication, feedback on the good and bad of the service provided, as well as a focus on innovating and regularly failing.

Our organization has a core value of be the exception. We try to challenge our team to meet this goal in many ways. That includes listening to our customers and thinking about how to meet them where they are going versus where they are today. A particular example is worth sharing to illustrate this important value proposition for small businesses. Our customers have been challenged to understand how to manage the difficult decision of security management and where to invest scarce resources. Instead of creating a poor security add-on to our existing service, we instead listened to the need and found an organization we could bring in that complemented us and was better than our company at this particular security requirement. Instead of losing business, we actually created opportunity by presenting a better overall solution driven by a packaged offering.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?

MS: In 2019, we decided to commit to a particular segment of the market, biotech and life sciences. This may have seemed obvious being headquartered in metro Boston. But it was still a significant effort to understand and impact the various organizations and financial funding sources. We nearly doubled the number of customers in less than two years by directing our services to bioitech and life sciences. This decision also was a fortunate one with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the majority of our new customers are relatively insulated from the impact of this sad disease, and in fact …

Cybercriminal tactics in 2021 will shift in new and innovative ways to attack individuals, their homes and devices to find a path to corporate networks.

That’s according to WatchGuard Technologies‘ security predictions for next year. The global pandemic has rapidly accelerated the existing shift toward remote work. Employees now operate beyond the protection of the corporate firewall. In turn, cybercriminal tactics will exploit these vulnerabilities.

WatchGuard’s Corey Nachreiner

Corey Nachreiner is WatchGuard’s CTO. He said security service providers were already preparing for many of the new challenges and opportunities. But 2020 has dramatically accelerated the trends.

“One obvious example is remote work,” he said. “Remote work is likely to be the norm, even post-pandemic. With most employees working outside an organization’s direct network purview, you need to adjust the security stack accordingly. For an attacker, how they target victims changes when the user isn’t protected by traditional corporate technologies. Security practitioners already have security controls to handle both scenarios, but they’ll likely have to rebalance which they focus on.”

The cloud, whether SaaS or IaaS/PaaS, isn’t new, Nachreiner said. But many organizations and service providers still have less experience securing cloud data when they’re somewhat limited by what’s allowed by third-party providers.

“There are many technologies and best practices that can indeed help an organization secure cloud resources,” he said. “But the industry still seems less familiar with them, and their value. There will be a lot of opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs that can help customers lock down their cloud data.”

People and Emotions

Automation will drive a new tidal wave of spear phishing campaigns, according to WatchGuard.

“Cybercriminals have already started to create tools that can automate the manual aspects of spear phishing,” Nachreiner said. “By combining such tools with programs that scan data from social media networks and company websites, phishers can send thousands of detailed, believable spear-phishing emails, with content customized to each victim. This will dramatically increase the volume of spear phishing emails attackers can send at once, which will improve their success rate. On the bright side, these automated, volumetric spear-phishing campaigns will likely be less sophisticated and easier to spot than the traditional, manually generated variety.”

Bad actors know anxiety and uncertainty make victims easier to exploit, he said. As society continues to grapple with COVID-19, global political strife and general financial insecurity in 2021, these automated spear-phishing attacks will prey on fears around the pandemic, politics and the economy.

Stealing Credentials

In addition, threat actors now have an abundance of tools to help them craft convincing spear-phishing emails that trick victims into giving up credentials or installing malware. They’re leveraging cloud hosting to piggyback on the otherwise good reputation of internet giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

“Most cloud-hosting services like Azure and AWS offer internet-accessible data storage where users can upload anything they’d like, from database backups to individual files and more,” Nachreiner said. “These services are exposed to the internet through custom subdomains or URL paths on prominent domains such as cloudfront.net, windows.net and googleapis.com. Threat actors commonly abuse these features to host website HTML files designed to mimic the authentication form of a legitimate website like Microsoft365 or Google Drive, and to steal credentials submitted by unsuspecting victims.”

WatchGuard predicts these cloud-hosting providers next year will begin heavily cracking down on phishing and other scams. They’ll do so by deploying automated tools and file validation that spot spoofed authentication portals.

Hitting Home

With work from home continuing through 2021 and beyond, cybercriminals will change their approach and create attacks specifically targeting the home worker.

“Malicious hackers often include worm functionality modules in their malware, designed to move laterally to other devices on a network,” Nachreiner said. “In 2021, cybercriminals will exploit under-protected home networks as an avenue to access valuable corporate endpoint devices. By deliberately seeking out and infecting the company-owned laptops and smart devices on our home networks, attackers could ultimately compromise corporate networks. Next year, we expect to see malware that not only spreads across networks, but looks for signs that an infected device is for corporate use (such as evidence of VPN usage).”

Smart Cars Targeted

In addition, smart cars keep getting smarter and more common, with more manufacturers releasing new models every year. Security researchers and black hat hackers alike are paying attention. In 2021, WatchGuard expects a surge in smart car attacks that leverage smart chargers.

“As with chargers for our mobile phones and other connected devices, smart car charging cables carry more than just energy,” Nachreiner said. “Although they don’t transfer data in the same way phone chargers do, smart car chargers do have a data component that helps them…

Today, every organization needs a trusted digital foundation that makes it possible to adapt and transform without unnecessary disruption. Hear Sanjay Poonen, VMware COO, discuss how the digital infrastructure and application solutions of VMware help you build, run, manage, connect and protect all of your customer’s apps, everywhere.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

Tenable just updated its Assure partner program with a new certification program, expanded service choices and a revamped partner portal.

The Tenable Assure partner program positions MSSPs and resellers to serve as expert advisers. They help organizations translate raw security data into a risk-based, metrics-driven program.

Jeff Brooks is Tenable‘s vice president of channels and business support.

Tenable’s Jeff Brooks

“We are continuously evaluating the Tenable Assure program features to ensure we’re setting partners up for success,” he said. “The new certification program, updated training curriculum highlighting our new integrations and features, expanded service choices and new, intuitive partner portal are designed to better equip our partners with the industry and product knowledge they need to solve customer problems.”

Cyber Exposure

Organizations of all sizes have accelerated their migration to the cloud and their adoption of new technologies. That includes IoT, mobile and DevOps. As their attack surface expands, these organizations turn to Tenable and its partners to help them see, predict and act to address their cyber exposure.

“We value partner feedback and consider our Tenable Assure partners part of our extended team,” Brooks said. “Ensuring they have the enablement, knowledge and experience to serve as our customers’ expert advisers is a top priority. We run global partner advisory board sessions where we collect feedback to help inform program updates. These activities play an important role in the new features we’re rolling out.

The updated training curriculum offers partners a competitive advantage, he said. It equips them with the expertise necessary to understand and solve the most pressing security challenges customers are facing today.

“This includes addressing IT/OT convergence and implementing risk-based vulnerability management programs,” Brooks said. “The streamlined collaboration offered by our new portal also increases the response time our partners can provide customers.”

Furthermore, the optional services delivery certification allows partners to own all of the services during the sales cycle, he said. Therefore, they become more strategic to the customer.

Collaboration Important

In a channel-led company, effective collaboration between partners and direct sales is critical, Brooks said.

“With these updates, we’ve streamlined the workflow between both teams and also increased the incentive for them to work effectively together,” he said.

“The new service delivery authorization from Tenable is a game-changer as we transition to a full-service model for our customers,” said Wendy Hoey, Optiv‘s senior director of partner alliances. “With this, alongside the new training and certifications, we can expand our joint customer base and provide strategic counsel, pragmatic solutions and custom services for risk-based vulnerability management.”

Microsoft has begun rolling out its new Teams meetings extensions and low-code tools to simplify the creation of chatbots. The company this week began releasing some of the new extensions and features and said others will appear this month.

Active usage of Teams has continued to rise this year with the latest tally of daily users topping 115,000. Microsoft previewed the new extensions and features at its Ignite virtual conference, held in September. The latest updates promise to make it easier for partners to customize Microsoft Teams meetings experience for customers. Partners with developers skilled in the Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code can create custom chatbots. But many partners don’t have benches of software developers, or they have customers that want to build their own chatbots.

To enable those partners to build chatbots into Microsoft Teams, the company has built that capability into its Power Platform.

“Microsoft Power Platform provides low code tools to build apps, workflows and chatbots, as well as deploy and manage them — all without leaving Teams,” according to a post by Nicole Herskowitz, general manager of the Microsoft Teams organization. Herskowitz noted that the Power Platform is now tailored for Microsoft Teams with the new:

• Power Apps for Teams: Built into Teams, an embed graphical app studio provides a low-code tool that lets partners and customers build and manage apps. It is suited for those with few or no programming skills.
• Power Automate app for Teams: A simplified workflow designer and templates that automates routine tasks.
• Power Virtual Agents app for Teams: A tool with an embedded bot studio, it enables non-programmers to create conversational bots for various functions such as IT helpdesk, operations FAQs and HR issue resolution.
• Microsoft Dataverse for Teams: The underlying low-code data platform for building and deploying apps and chatbots in Teams. Dataverse is also designed to ease application life cycle management and provide more control over data uses to build apps, bots and workflows in Teams.

Microsoft Teams Meetings App Extensions

The extensions include 19 popular SaaS-based productivity and project management apps enhanced to with Teams meetings. Among those available is Asana, a project management and planning tool. Herskowitz noted that many customers use Asana in Teams chat and channels to manage projects and track their tasks.

Microsoft’s Nicole Herskowitz

“Now you can add the Asana app into your Teams meeting invite so that during a meeting, you can easily create new action items,” she said. “After the meeting, everyone can see the action items in the project plan and start working through them.”

Also now available is an update to Microsoft Forms that enables users to conduct Polls in Teams Meetings.

“Whether you are running a large-scale training session, leading your monthly all hands, or teaching in a remote classroom, Polls in Teams meetings enables meeting presenters to get real-time feedback and turn attendees into active participants,” according to a post by Microsoft product marketing manager Melinda Hu.

Microsoft MVP and consultant with Jumpto365, Matt Wade, posted a demo of the polling feature.

“It turns out they’re very simple and easy to use, but also not super robust,” Wade noted. “Meeting presenters manage the questions and anyone in the meeting (presenters and attendees) can respond. There are also some limitations you’ll want to be aware of as you dive into the world of meetings polls. But overall, these can be really useful for getting quick, wide-ranging answers in your everyday meetings.”

Other SaaS extensions from partners that are now available in the Microsoft Teams apps store include Decisions, Pigeonhole, Polly and Teamflect. Set for release within weeks are Buncee, HireVue, Lucid Agreements, Monday.com, Phenom, Range, Slido, Soapbox, Talview, Wakelet and xMatters.

Herskowitz noted that developers can integrate these and other apps in Microsoft’s Teams store to build configurable tabs, chatbots and message extension applications. Teams is an extensible platform with a broad set of capabilities and entry points, “so you can also easily create custom apps,” she said. One such example is electronic medical records software provider Epic Systems, which recently built a connector to Teams, enabling HIPAA and HITECH compliant telehealth sessions.

The latest FireEye acquisition is Respond Software, a cybersecurity investigation automation company, for $186 million in cash and stock.

FireEye also announced a $400 million strategic investment led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities. The funding will support strategic growth initiatives, including this acquisition.

The acquisition opens new market opportunities to deliver extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities to more customers. Additionally, it adds more capabilities to FireEye’s Mandiant Advantage platform.

The latest FireEye acquisition closed on Wednesday.

FireEye’s Peter Bailey

Peter Bailey is FireEye‘s executive vice president and COO. He said XDR is a fast-growing security technology that addresses multiple customer challenges. Those include staffing shortages and connecting disparate systems to identify the weak signals of an attack.

“The integration of the cloud-based AI technology from Respond into our controls-agnostic Mandiant Advantage platform means that we can deliver XDR to almost any customer,” he said.

There will be a lot of opportunity for partners to enable their customers with XDR technology, Bailey said.

Respond Analyst Key Component

Respond Analyst is an XDR engine that accelerates cyber investigation and response. This technology will become a key part of the Mandiant Advantage platform.

“The acquisition automates our existing competitive advantage by bringing a machine-based Mandiant expert into a customer’s environment to manage L1 SOC response and workflows,” Bailey said. “The XDR engine will be part of our Mandiant Advantage platform, along with our intelligence and validation solutions in the same portal. This will offer customers a compelling dashboard to proactively test as well as respond to attacks on their organization.”

Opportunities for Joint Partners

For the immediate future it’s business as usual for Respond’s partners, Bailey said.

“We will continue to sell the solution as we integrate it into our products,” he said. “We see a lot of opportunities for our joint partners and will have more to share about the future of the partner program as we move past the acquisition.”

“Respond’s product dramatically reduces time spent investigating false positives,” said Mike Armistead, Respond’s CEO prior to the acquisition. “Now coupled with Mandiant’s world-class threat intelligence and incident response expertise feeding our models, customers can be confident the most up-to-date and relevant attack tactics and techniques are recognized and appropriately escalated. This results in more coverage, faster resolution of incidents, and ultimately, less risk at lower cost.”

Synnex this week announced Varnex 2.0, an evolution of the distributor’s 10-year-old exclusive peer-to-peer reseller community. At the same time, Synnex celebrated its 40^th year in business. These events were discussed this week at the two-day Fall Varnex 2020 (virtual) conference.

Varnex 2.0 will be technology-driven. To date, the peer-to-peer community has been more focused on marketing, collaboration and partnerships. According to Synnex, its custom community of resellers – about 450 in North America – represents more than $1.3 billion in annual topline revenue.

Synnex’s Michael Urban

Michael Urban, president, worldwide technology solutions distribution at Synnex, elaborates on Varnex 2.0. He talks about what Varnex 2.0 means to existing Varnex partners, as well as potential members the company wants to attract.

Channel Futures: Big step to evolve the exclusive Varnex program. Tell us more.

Michael Urban: Varnex 2.0 means that we’re looking forward to having a much more advanced program for our customer partners. We’ve had a strong partnership with Varnex members and support them in all ways. But with 2.0, the idea of Varnex is enhanced, making it richer for the market.

What we’ve seen is that the partner focus over the past 10 years is broad. Our customers asked for certain deliverables, say a PC and software, etc. But now solutions are more complex. We’ve seen partners migrate to a more niche approach focusing on a certain area. They’re specialists, they know what to do and they’ve found a way to make money in this niche. Specialization has been key for many of our Varnex partners.

Now, there’s one issue with that. You might not be able to offer a complete solution to a customer. The risk is that a customer may have to go to someone else that has a broader portfolio or solution.

With our partners, we looked into what has to change in the Varnex community.

CP: Tell us more about Varnex 2.0.

MU: The outcome is to make Varnex bigger and better. About a year ago, we reactivated the “Solvs” on the technology side. We’d also like to have more Solvs, as each is specialized in a certain area. [Here are the Synnex technology Solvs: VisualSolv, MobilitySolv, SecurityNetSolv, UCSolv, PrintSolv, PowerSolv, ComponentSolv, and StorageSolv.] Here’s what the Solvs mean for partners. For example, the UCSolv: What you find is a dedicated team, or business unit, with project managers, sales and service to support the implementation. The same goes for the other Solvs.

Together with the Varnex community, we decided that if you want to be a Varnex member in the future you have to be recommended on one of the Solvs. Then we know you’re a specialist for that Solv.

So if a Varnex member is approached by a customer for UC and this member is capable but specializes in another Solv, another Varnex member specialist can be brought in. The customer engagement is led by the initial partner. And Synnex guarantees this all works out and no one takes another member’s customer.

That’s the foundation of the change to Varnex 2.0.

CF: Is Varnex 2.0 ready to go?

MU: This is the announcement, and now we have more work to do. We already built out a dedicated team within Synnex who will work with partners. We’ll continue to make investments as Varnex 2.0 grows.

Some Varnex members are already prequalified as Varnex 2.0 members. They will also be more present in the market and we’ll do more marketing activities. There will be more vendor support, and Synnex will stand behind its Varnex 2.0 members. Customers won’t have to stray to find a more qualified partner.

We know that existing Varnex members are qualified because …

Despite the growing adoption of intelligent service support options like AI-powered chatbots, service desk agents remain at the core of successful IT support and service delivery. Employees (end users) prefer to talk with a human agent who understands their technical issues and empathizes with the practical problems arising from such issues. On the other hand, employers (organizations) find such manual IT support to be bulky on their budget when compared to the advanced automated support solutions available in the market.

With the uncertainty that the pandemic has thrown in the air, MSPs need to find ways to make their business much more efficient. One of the most effective ways to do that is to have high agent productivity. The challenge is finding a tangible way of quantifying the effectiveness of the agent with high accuracy. Several service desk metrics come in handy to measure agent productivity, and one of them is agent utilization. Before exploring ways to increase agent utilization, let’s define what agent utilization is and how to use the metric.

The “What’s” of Agent Utilization

Agent utilization is a measure of the productivity of a service desk support staff. It is the ratio between work produced by a staff agent to their work capacity. Even though the definition seems simple and straightforward, the way in which “work produced” and “work capacity” are identified is highly subjective. It isn’t straightforward to calculate these factors accurately. Organizations need to invest time in strategically defining and standardizing these factors to arrive at a meaningful agent utilization value.

Work produced typically includes a range of tasks executed by service desk agents. The number of tasks executed or issues handled by an agent is generally monitored over a specific period.

Not all issues that come through the service desk are of the same nature. The complexity and dependencies need to be taken into account while evaluating the issues handled. The weight given to a complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive issue must be different from the weight given to an issue that’s solved in a single engagement.

In addition to the nature of the issue, the timing and season should also be considered factors. The issues that come in during the working hours will be heavier than those that come during the evenings. Likewise, the volume and frequency of issues coming in during holidays will be much less than during regular workdays. Work capacity also has several variables in terms of seasons, type/nature of issues handled, etc.

The “How’s” of Agent Utilization

Agent utilization can be increased by either increasing the work produced by the agents or decreasing the agents’ work capacity.

Either way, appropriate strategies and frameworks need to be deployed and followed to ensure high efficiency. One of the ways to increase agent utilization is to invest in futuristic technologies like AIOps.

Leverage AIOps to increase Agent Utilization

Organizations across the world aim to reduce their cost and increase their profit. With so many advanced technologies available, it’s possible to cut down on the cost by investing in automation provided by sophisticated AI functionalities. 

Hemalakshmi is a Product Expert with Freshworks. Her responsibility includes educating and helping industry peers and customers on best practices, tips and tricks, quick guides, and solutions around IT Service Management and its various use cases. In her 6+ years of experience in the core SaaS business applications serving as a product expert, Hema has worked with multiple businesses in helping them with their business needs and setting up their service desk solution – Freshservice. Follow her on LinkedIn.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

Chris Krebs’ firing by President Trump puts the United States at greater risk for cyberattacks. It also damages the relationship between the cybersecurity industry and government.

That’s according to Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and advisory CISO at Thycotic. He’s among several cybersecurity experts who commented on the firing.

Krebs was director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Trump fired him because he said there’s “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Thycotic’s Joseph Carson

“Christopher Krebs is an exceptional leader who closed the gap between industry and government, bringing security experts together to protect the United States from cyberattacks,” Carson said.

Governments need leaders like Krebs to ask tough questions, speak the truth and be transparent with citizens, he said.

“The CISA has become an important cybersecurity intelligence source under Krebs’ leadership and went well beyond the requirements they set,” Carson said.

Krebs’ loss damages the relationship between industry experts and the government, he said. Krebs was bridging the gap that’s now void.

Damaged Credibility

Nigel Thorpe is technical director at SecureAge. He said damaged credibility is a major short-term consequence.

SecureAge’s Nigel Thorpe

“Every state official that’s seen their career cut short as a result of the president’s temperament is piling onto the potential for skepticism from the intelligence community and state partners, foreign and domestic, regarding future statements made by CISA about the election or any other pertinent matters,” he said.

There’s also the question of whether Krebs’ replacement will be trustworthy or a Trump loyalist, Thorpe said.

“Will they, too, undercut the validity of the election process?” he said. “These questions alone can erode trust in our cyber defense integrity around the world. And they’ll remain an unfortunate constant throughout the narrative in the Krebs firing fallout until the new administration takes hold.”

The message this move sends to the broader international collection of cybercriminals and advanced persistent threats (APTs) is very negative, Thorpe said. It says the United States is divided and distracted, and lacks a united defensive front against cyberattacks.

“We could very well see an uptick in continued activity from current threats, as bad actors may see this news as a rallying cry over the weeks ahead,” Thorpe said. “Disinformation campaigns regarding election results, COVID-19 themed phishing attacks and data theft attempts on our health care and vaccine research infrastructures were all already happening. Now they might happen a bit more often.”

Impacting CISA

Dirk Schrader is global vice president of New Net Technologies (NNT).

NNT’s Dick Schrader

“In cybersecurity, the capability of an organization’s management to orchestrate and to steer initiatives is vital for the overall security status,” he said.

If management changes or disappears, the cybersecurity strategy is in jeopardy, Schrader said.

“That hampers an organization’s ability to respond the ever-changing environment,” he said. “It is not different for the CISA with the demise of two senior figures in the past 24 hours. It will impact the agency’s ability to steer, to orchestrate.”

Heather Paunet is senior vice president at Untangle. She said the firing once again …