Splunk Acquisition and The Blob with Allie Mellen – ESW #333
This week, we changed things up a bit for the news segment and Allie Mellen joins us as a surprise guest host! We discuss Cisco's Splunk acquisition and what it means for Splunk customers, and "The Blob" - Allie's term describing the negative forces responsible for much of the overhyped marketing, silly trends, and substandard products we see in the industry.
Segment Resources: Allie's blog on Cisco/Splunk: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/splunk-is-good-for-cisco-but-cisco-needs-to-convince-splunk-customers-that-cisco-is-good-for-them/ Allie's blog on The Blob: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-blob-is-poisoning-the-security-industry/
Announcements
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Guest
Allie Mellen is a Forrester analyst covering security operations, nation-state threats, and the use of automation, machine learning, and AI in security tools. She has been in the technology industry for over a decade in various engineering roles: doing research at MIT, running her own engineering consultancy, and being a hacker before finally becoming a security practitioner. She now advises Fortune 500 CISOs and security teams on their detection and response practice and frequently speaks at industry-leading events and with the press.
Hosts
- 1. FUNDING: Dragos Raises an Additional $74M in Series D Round
- 2. FUNDING: Israeli cyber firm Legit Security raises $40 million in private funding
- 3. FUNDING: Announcing Alcion’s Series A and General Availability of Our AI-driven Backup-as-a-Service Platform
$21M Series A, led by Veeam. This is an interesting one. So the primary two founders, Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra sold their previous company, Kasten, to Veeam in late 2020. Kasten made a Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery product.
It seems that Kasten's two founders have spun out of Veeam, but are primarily funded by them, suggesting that the new company, Alcion, will also be eventually acquired by Veeam. The new company is also backup-focused, but on Microsoft 365 this time, rather than containers.
- 4. FUNDING: European cyber insurance startup Stoïk raises $10.7 million and expands to Germany
- 5. FUNDING: Rocket.Chat Raises US$10M in Series A Bridge Funding
- 6. FUNDING: Discern Security Raises $3M in Seed Funding
- 7. ACQUISITIONS: WatchGuard Acquires CyGlass – CyGlass
- 8. ACQUISITIONS: GlassWire Joins Forces with Domotz!
- 9. ACQUISITION RUMORS: Palo Alto Networks in advanced negotiations to acquire Dig Security in $300-$400 million deal
- 10. NEW TOOLS: Sowing Chaos and Reaping Rewards in Confluence and Jira
- 11. NEW PRODUCTS: Introducing Semgrep Secrets
- 12. NEW PRODUCTS: runZero 4.0: Introducing the runZero Platform and our new Community Edition
- 13. ESSAYS: Finding Your Moat – mattjay
- 14. ESSAYS: The Compounding Power of Ideas
- 15. ESSAYS: CISOs are struggling to get cybersecurity budgets: Report
- 16. RESEARCH: When It Comes to Email Security, the Cloud You Pick Matters
- 17. RANT: Security awareness assessments actively harmful to security (from @cybergibbons on Twitter)
I'm not going to call out the particular vendor named in this rant, because I don't think this issue is unique to one vendor. The questions on this assessment are, at best, vague and confusing. At worst, I have to agree with the poster - they're actively harmful.
- 18. SQUIRREL: It’s not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird.
