Security Magazine

It's easy to picture a data center as a single, heavily guarded building sitting by itself, but the reality isn’t as clean-cut, since data centers come in different shapes and sizes. Small ones may occupy the floor of a building near a city center, while large-scale campuses operate more like self-contained cities, with independent cooling systems, fuel storage, backup power, and utility connections spread across a wide physical footprint.

Bonavita: Most of my career has been at the intersection of technology and business transformation. I’ve led technology platform sales at Accenture, run a large business process outsourcing operation that I helped transform from a premise-based model to a fully cloud-based one, and most recently built out specialized SD-WAN, SASE, and cybersecurity sales teams at Lumen Technologies before joining GTT.

A report by Drata recently analyzed survey responses from security and IT professionals on AI adoption trends. The report exposes a widening gap between what organizations expected from AI in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and what it has actually delivered — and traces that gap to three compounding failures: vendors oversold, buyers bought breadth, and governance never caught up.

“Looking back, one of the most important lessons I learned was that growth often comes from stepping into gaps rather than following the crowd. Choosing that path early in my career shaped the opportunities that followed and ultimately influenced the direction of my professional life,” Cerra says. Cerra served with the U.S. Secret Service for more than 20 years, leading investigations, conducting protective operations and advancing security initiatives.

Most enterprise security architectures rest on one assumption: when something goes wrong, someone can respond. An administrator investigates an alert. A technician replaces hardware or applies a patch. At sea, that assumption fails, and several common security controls fail with it. Take secure boot. It verifies that a device starts from a trusted, signed image. It does not verify that the image is still the version the operator would want running months or years later.

A recent report by the Cloud Security Alliance analyzed survey data from nearly 1000 cybersecurity leaders. The report found that nearly half of respondents who experienced a production incident say it involved a previously identified vulnerability. Additionally, 9% of organizations remediate critical or high-severity vulnerabilities in production within 24 hours, while 74% take between one and seven days.

That is a materially different scale of risk. An LLM is closer to a digital library: useful, powerful, but largely dependent on the user. An AI agent is closer to an enhanced human operator. It can act at machine speed, across connected systems, using the permissions it has been granted. Yet, many organizations are still treating these agents as ordinary applications, when they should be governing them more like high-risk users with privileged access.

A recent report by Kana analyzed the adoption of AI systems. Seventy percent of respondents already run custom AI agents handling real marketing tasks in production. Only 3% report no marketing AI use at all. The question executives are wrestling with is no longer adoption, it’s whether they can scale and govern what is already running. Across the full sample, 40% say the Chief AI Officer should own agentic marketing strategy and execution.

“I prepared reports for industry partners and conducted investigations into unauthorized operations, including one case that ultimately resulted in enforcement action,” Stuyt shares. One of the new responsibilities she took on was to build the airport’s drone response capabilities. Stuyt has invested her time and efforts into managing drone security for YOW, finding it integral to airport security. “The drone industry is evolving rapidly with technology advancing at an unprecedented pace.

Security professionals face constantly evolving threats and challenges – security is never static which is something that Denise Platon personally embodies. "Security can never be approached as a static discipline,” she says. “It's just constantly evolving." Growing up in the Washington DC metro area, Platon was influenced by national affairs leading to her studying global affairs and intelligence analysis at George Mason University.