[Music] this year we had the privilege to host 12 season roundtables across north america canada australia and india and as you might imagine since they were cesar round tables a lot of the attendees were indeed csos but also deputy csos and a number of cios who have security as part of their china and there was a occasionally an industry specific tilt to some of these conversations across financial services oil energy and gas retail healthcare government but really varied participants across global enterprises of different sizes but all with a common mission that of identifying and driving down cyber risk you could probably guess the key concerns that our customers raised this year the first concern was that of cyber resiliency 2020 has raised the question of how well would companies cope in a cyber equivalent pandemic event similarly given the pandemic what risk considerations should be prioritized for csos remote security has always been a common topic endpoint protection vpns principles of least privilege but this year we have seen these programs elevated from a cso or cio conversation to becoming top of mind for ceos as entire workforces became remote many of our customers reported an increase in fishing and spear phishing attacks where attackers have been utilizing pandemic related internal and external communications to employees for example trying to get you to click on a work from home notification ransomware has also been a pervasive topic in industry it has been on the rise for many years but it seems that as companies reassess their resiliency capabilities in general this year ransomware has come to the forefront we've also had customers that have been victims to ransomware and we've fostered learnings and shared tactics with many of our customer security teams but all this it rolls up and reporting to the board i have yet to speak to a cso that hasn't had their board communications increase during the pandemic and i expect this to continue throughout 2021. it was of course interesting to hear our customer see some priorities for 2021 but the first one was unanimous and clear to improve security resiliency capabilities and to drive down risk however another common theme that faced many of our customers was cost to do more with less to drive new efficiencies and automation as the pandemic has taken its financial toll a big topic in this vein was tool consolidation and consistency if you're using security products are they fully integrated into your environment are you taking full advantage of the licensing costs that you're paying for another takeaway that really excited me was the first for more collaboration between csos and security organizations sharing lessons learned tactics for identifying known yet also unknown risks and strengthening relationships between security practitioners as we're all in the same fight together as we had these sisa roundtables we did see some concerns that vary based upon region and industry for example in india we saw the larger financial services institutions leading the way as experts but also especially in the us and the uk with a desire to satisfy regulators and their increased concerns on security resiliency it is also very interesting to see apj as a large incubator region for security specialists and globally we've seen a continued emergence of security startups especially coming out of israel with a focus on automation that enables security teams to be more successful in their work to support development groups i would suspect much more in the security startup space throughout 2021 and beyond you