Guest:

• Balazs Scheidler, CEO at Axoflow, original founder of syslog-ng

Topics:

• Are we really coming to "access to security data" and away from "centralizing the data"?
• How to detect without the same storage for all logs?
• Is data pipeline a part of SIEM or is it standalone? Will this just collapse into SIEM soon?
• Tell us about the issues with log pipelines in the past?
• What about enrichment? Why do it in a pipeline, and not in a SIEM?
• We are unable to share enough practices between security teams. How are we fixing it? Is pipelines part of the answer?
• Do you have a piece of advice for people who want to do more than save on their SIEM costs?

Resources:

• EP197 SIEM (Decoupled or Not), and Security Data Lakes: A Google SecOps Perspective
• EP190 Unraveling the Security Data Fabric: Need, Benefits, and Futures
• EP228 SIEM in 2025: Still Hard? Reimagining Detection at Cloud Scale and with More Pipelines
• Axoflow podcast and Anton on it
• "Decoupled SIEM: Where I Think We Are Now?" blog
• "Decoupled SIEM: Brilliant or Stupid?" blog
• "Output-driven SIEM — 13 years later" blog

Guest:

• Monzy Merza, co-founder and CEO at Crogl

Topics:

• We often hear about the aspirational idea of an "IronMan suit" for the SOC—a system that empowers analysts to be faster and more effective. What does this ideal future of security operations look like from your perspective, and what are the primary obstacles preventing SOCs from achieving it today?
• You've also raised a metaphor of AI in the SOC as a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" situation. Could you walk us through what you see as the "Jekyll"—the noble, beneficial promise of AI—and what are the factors that can turn it into the dangerous "Mr. Hyde"?
• Let's drill down into the heart of the "Mr. Hyde" problem: the data. Many believe that AI can fix a team's messy data, but you've noted that "it's all about the data, duh." What's the story?
• "AI ready SOC" - What is the foundational work a SOC needs to do to ensure their data is AI-ready, and what happens when they skip this step?
• And is there anything we can do to use AI to help with this foundational problem?
• How do we measure progress towards AI SOC? What gets better at what time? How would we know?
• What SOC metrics will show improvement? Will anything get worse?

Resources:

• EP242 The AI SOC: Is This The Automation We've Been Waiting For?
• EP170 Redefining Security Operations: Practical Applications of GenAI in the SOC
• EP227 AI-Native MDR: Betting on the Future of Security Operations?
• EP236 Accelerated SIEM Journey: A SOC Leader's Playbook for Modernization and AI
• EP238 Google Lessons for Using AI Agents for Securing Our Enterprise
• "Simple to Ask: Is Your SOC AI Ready? Not Simple to Answer!" blog
• Nassim Taleb "Antifragile" book
• "AI Superpowers" book
• "Attention Is All You Need" paper

Guest:

• Jibran Ilyas, Director for Incident Response at Google Cloud

Topics:

• What is this tabletop thing, please tell us about running a good security incident tabletop?
• Why are tabletops for incident response preparedness so amazingly effective yet rarely done well?
• This is cheap/easy/useful so why do so many fail to do it? Why are tabletops seen as kind of like elite pursuit?
• What's your favorite Cloud-centric scenario for tabletop exercises? Ransomware? But there is little ransomware in the cloud, no?
• What are other good cloud tabletop scenarios?

Resources:

• EP60 Impersonating Service Accounts in GCP and Beyond: Cloud Security Is About IAM?
• EP179 Teamwork Under Stress: Expedition Behavior in Cybersecurity Incident Response
• EP222 From Post-IR Lessons to Proactive Security: Deconstructing Mandiant M-Trends
• EP177 Cloud Incident Confessions: Top 5 Mistakes Leading to Breaches from Mandiant
• EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics
• EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster?

Guest:

• David Gee, Board Risk Advisor, Non-Executive Director & Author, former CISO

Topics:

• Drawing from the "Aspiring CIO and CISO" book's focus on continuous improvement, how have you seen the necessary skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviors for a CISO evolve, especially when guiding an organization through a transformation?
• Could you share lessons learned about leadership and organizational resilience during such a critical period, and how does that experience reshape your approach to future transformations?
• Many organizations are undergoing transformations, often heavily involving cloud technologies. From your perspective, what is the most crucial—and perhaps often overlooked—role a CISO plays in ensuring security is an enabler, not a roadblock, during such large-scale changes?
• Have you ever seen a CISO who is a cloud champion for the organization?
• Your best advice for a CISO meeting cloud for the first time?
• What is your best advice for a CISO meeting AI for the first time?
• How do you balance the continuous self-improvement and development with the day-to-day pressures and responsibilities?

Resources:

• "A Day in the Life of a CISO: Personal Mentorship from 24+ Battle-Tested CISOs — Mentoring We Never Got" book
• "The Aspiring CIO and CISO: A career guide to developing leadership skills, knowledge, experience, and behavior" book
• EP201 Every CTO Should Be a CSTO (Or Else!) - Transformation Lessons from The Hoff
• EP101 Cloud Threat Detection Lessons from a CISO
• EP104 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: And The Magic Starts to Happen!
• EP129 How CISO Cloud Dreams and Realities Collide
• All CISO podcast episodes
• "Shadow Agents: A New Era of Shadow AI Risk in the Enterprise" blog
• "Blocking shadow agents won't work. Here's a more secure way forward" blog

Guest:

• Sumedh Thakar, President and CEO, Qualys
  

Topics:

• How did vulnerability management (VM) change since Qualys was founded in 1999? What is different about VM today?
• Can we actually remediate vulnerabilities automatically at scale? Why did this work for you even though many expected it would not?
• Where does cloud fit into modern vulnerability management?
• How does AI help vulnerability management today? What is real?
• What is this Risk Operations Center (ROC) concept and how it helps in vulnerability management?

Resources:

• 2025 DBIR Report
• Qualys ROC concept defined
• Qualys ROC-on conference
• Shaping the Future of Cyber Risk Management blog
• Qualys State of Cyber Risk Assessment Report
• EP109 How Google Does Vulnerability Management: The Not So Secret Secrets!

Guest:

• Rick Caccia, CEO and Co-Founder, Witness AI

Topics:

• In what ways is the current wave of enterprise AI adoption different from previous technology shifts? If we say "but it is different this time", then why?
• What is your take on "consumer grade AI for business" vs enterprise AI?
• A lot of this sounds a bit like the CASB era circa 2014. How is this different with AI?
• The concept of "routing prompts for risk and cost management" is intriguing. Can you elaborate on the architecture and specific AI engines Witness AI uses to achieve this, especially for large global corporations?
• What are you seeing in the identity space for AI access? Can you give us a rundown of the different tradeoffs teams are making when it comes to managing identities for agents?

Resources:

• EP226 AI Supply Chain Security: Old Lessons, New Poisons, and Agentic Dreams
• EP173 SAIF in Focus: 5 AI Security Risks and SAIF Mitigations
• EP84 How to Secure Artificial Intelligence (AI): Threats, Approaches, Lessons So Far
• Witness AI blog
• Shadow Agents: A New Era of Shadow AI Risk in the Enterprise
• Blocking shadow agents won't work. Here's a more secure way forward
• Shadow AI Strikes Back: Enterprise AI Absent Oversight in the Age of Gen AI
• Cloud CISO Perspectives: How Google secures AI Agents
• "The Soul of a New Machine" book
• Emoji Attack: A Method for Misleading Judge LLMs in Safety Risk Detection

Guest:

• Jon Oltsik, security researcher, ex-ESG analyst

Topics:

• You invented the concept of SOAPA – Security Operations & Analytics Platform Architecture. As we look towards SOAPA 2025, how do you see the ongoing debate between consolidating security around a single platform versus a more disaggregated, best-of-breed approach playing out?
• What are the key drivers for either strategy in today's complex environments? How can we have both "decoupling" and platformization going at the same time?
• With all the buzz around Generative AI and Agentic AI, how do you envision these technologies changing the future of the Security Operations Center (and SOAPA of course)?
• Where do you see AI really work today in the SOC and what is the proof of that actually happening? What does a realistic "AI SOC" look like in the next few years, and what are the practical implications for security teams?
• "Integration" is always a hot topic in security - and it has been for decades. Within the context of SOAPA and the adoption of advanced analytics, where do you see the most critical integration challenges today – whether it's vendor-centric ecosystems, strategic partnerships, or the push for open standards?

Resources:

• Jon Oltsik "The Cybersecurity Bridge" podcast (Anton on it)
• EP236 Accelerated SIEM Journey: A SOC Leader's Playbook for Modernization and AI
• EP242 The AI SOC: Is This The Automation We've Been Waiting For?
• EP202 Beyond Tiered SOCs: Detection as Code and the Rise of Response Engineering
• EP180 SOC Crossroads: Optimization vs Transformation - Two Paths for Security Operations Center
• EP170 Redefining Security Operations: Practical Applications of GenAI in the SOC
• EP73 Your SOC Is Dead? Evolve to Output-driven Detect and Respond!
• Daniel Suarez "Daemon" book and its sequel "Delta V"

Guest:

• Cy Khormaee, CEO, AegisAI
• Ryan Luo, CTO, AegisAI

Topics:

• What is the state of email security in 2025?
• Why start an email security company now?
• Is it true that there are new and accelerating AI threats to email?
• It sounds cliche, but do you really have to use good AI to fight bad AI?
• What did you learn from your time fighting abuse at scale at Google that is helping you now
• How do you see the future of email security and what role will AI play?

Resources:

• aegisai.ai
• EP40 2021: Phishing is Solved?
• EP41 Beyond Phishing: Email Security Isn't Solved
• EP28 Tales from the Trenches: Using AI for Gmail Security
• EP50 The Epic Battle: Machine Learning vs Millions of Malicious Documents