JM: Hey guys, Jordan Mauriello with CRITICALSTART here, Senior Vice President of Managed Services. Today I have with me Michael Balboni, President of Redland Strategies, former Senator, Assemblyman, advisor to Homeland Security. Honored to have him here with us today. We’ve been doing some awesome discussions about things that we’re doing at CRITICALSTART and working with Redland Strategies.
JM: Today we wanted to take an opportunity just to talk to Michael about some general cybersecurity issues. He’s a major influencer in our community. I know many of you already know who he is, and has had a major impact even on some of the legislature that we’ve seen around our industry too as well. We want to take the time to get some thoughts from him on some of the direction the industry’s going and the impact that some of the changes we see in cyber in general are having on national defense, the role of Senate and Congress, and where that’s going from a legislature perspective.
JM: We’re going to open up and have a nice, fun conversation here about some of these issues. Thank you so much for being with us, Michael.
MB: Thanks for having me Jordan, and thanks for your service to the country in the military.
JM: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate your support.
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JM: One last thing I’ll ask you before we wrap it up here today. If you could make one recommendation to C-suite executives about cybersecurity and risk, what would that recommendation be today?
MB: The recommendation would be to spend time thinking about your data and what needs to be protected. How are you protecting it today and is there a better way to identify the threats? The old metaphor I use is if you knew where a fire was going to break out during the year, you knew the day and the time that a fire was going to break out, even on a place like my home area of Long Island with 3 million people, but you knew where a fire was going to break out, you would only need one fire department.
MB: They could go there and they can wait, what’s going on? The same analogy works with, if you knew where threats were coming from and you could actually resolve and get rid of so much of the uncertainty and only focus on the things that really mattered that went after your core data and you could stop that, that’d be such a better use of time, much more cost-effective and frankly give you the surety that you have the ability to identify and stop a threat. That’s really where I want CISOs to get to.
JM: That’s great. Well, I so much appreciate your time. Thanks for being here with us.
MB: It’s been great working and collaborating with you. This is a really important topic.
JM: It’s a pleasure. All right. Well, thank you guys for joining us today. We appreciate it and hope you enjoyed our topics.
