SumUp

Ante Gulam is a cyber-security professional with strong technical background and 20 years of experience in the industry. He is passionate about democratizing security through cultural transformations, implementing scalable security programs and leading high performing teams within high-growth environments. Ante is highly experienced in implementation of leading-edge technologies while balancing security and risks with innovation and business operations. He has actively contributed to various public and private bug bounty programs and has presented security researches at security conferences worldwide.

How do you envision the future of the space?

In the future, as technology in the field of cyber security continues to advance, there will be a greater need for us to examine data points. We must therefore embrace more capabilities to promptly evaluate that data and effectively separate the signals from the noise. Because if we don’t do enough to extract it, such as improving the signal-to-noise ratio, we’ll end up generating more and more noise. Moreover as a vendor, we must be able to contextualize information and tie it to the our organization perimeters.’

As a cyber-security leader what are some of the challenges that you face in your day to day activities?

One of the main problems that leaders in cyber security space currently have is scalability. Due to the constant flow of new data points, it is becoming increasingly difficult for leaders to connect data to organization goal. Additionally, from a process perspective, leaders struggle with how to scale in a way that serves their organization internally and effectively at the same time. They also struggle with how to contextualize all the work they are doing in order to try and truly connect the dots and ensure that their cybersecurity efforts are improving over time. Therefore, being able to effectively drive proper projects understanding what the major priorities are is very important.

Developing stronger sharing skills is crucial for security leaders because it will help the entire industry advance much more quickly

What are some of the new technology in the cyber security space that you are optimistic about?

There’s two aspects I want to focus on. The first is that more and more vendors and tech-related businesses are realizing that giving clients data and expecting them to do anything with it is insufficient. Instead, they should try to contextualize the data. This is something I am optimistic about because I notice that an increasing number of vendors are making genuine efforts to think in this way and address this issue. The second aspect that there is a great deal of innovation taking place now at the low level. In order to address issues, we must lower our sights. Looking around its wonderful to see that there are developing solutions in this regard as well, allowing us to literally tackle issues at the kernel level rather than attempting to do it at the application level.

What is your piece of advice for budding professionals in the field?

When we look at the legacy of how we kind of started our journey as a cyber-security leader we find most of security communities were fairly close and there was not enough knowledge sharing that took place. Even though we have clearly become better at this over the years, we are still not very good at it. Developing stronger sharing skills is crucial for security leaders because it will help the entire industry advance much more quickly. Moreover, when it comes to contextualization which is currently the biggest painpont within the security kind of industry, from the technology perspective. To overcome it, it is very important for us to focus on basics. As having good knowledge on fundamentals really help us solve problems that we are having.