Brian McKenna

Advice on presenting to a board: talk in business risk terms always; constant vigilance; scenarios not metrics; actively pull all sorts of risk in; use analogies; learn the actual business!

More from the panel at Qualys' ROCon event in London: the AI discussion. Courtney Holm -- boards are concerned about dumbing down of the workforce. Mulheron: scale and speed is main (double) aspect to be alert to re AI risk.

Sir Ian Andrews: flagging the importance of the NCSC and how it is under-utilized -- great free resources via its web site.

Sir Ian Andrews: non-executive director roles are key in board level governance re risk; but also, keeping in mind the broad gamut of risks is critical -- climate risk as an example.

Sir Ian Andrews: NCSC did flag cyber risk to economic security in main report last year, but key matter is to be resilient to risk as broadly as possible.

Mulheron: business case for the cost of a tool should not be what CISO comes to a board with. Should be more about partnering with the board, understanding the risk to the business holistically, stategically, etc

Jim Mulheron, financial services former chief risk officer, Standard Chartered -- boards need to be conversed with in terms of business risk, not geeky lists of vulnerabilities etc (paraphrasing; always good to hear my accent on stage :).

Panel at Qualys' ROCon 26 ... Sir Ian Andrews, vice chair, National Preparedness Commission: hates obfuscatory word "cybersecurity"; our focus should be on risk as such.

And Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar contended mainly that business risk management should govern cybersecurity thinking, not patching per se -- not the be all and end all; not all vulns will be ubiquitously exploitable. He was also funny.

At Qualys' ROCon26 in London. Big theme of Sarah Armstrong's keynote was need for business security professionals to really think strategically, and to be ready to pivot.

Kushwant Singh, SVP, product management, AI Application Development, Salesforce: presenting Agentforce Vibes 2.0, their vibe coding agent. Headlessness a running theme -- a concept beloved of developers!

Inzerillo: much of keynote will revolve around what travel management Engine does with Salesforce's agentic tech. Seems like they are all in on everything, including Slackbot, Tableau -- the whole agentic enterprise philosophy. And big into the open ecosystem concept.

Inzerillo: S/f Headless 360 open to any agent. Talking about doing everything "agentically", and companies being changed with "legions" of agents, in an open ecosystem, and in S/f AgentExchange ecosystem.

#TDX26 Stokes: introduces Joe Inzerillo, president, enterprise & AI technology: narrative of agentic revolution being probabilistic not deterministic, as has been case in software building till now. Coding agents will empower human builders as never before.

Watching the Salesforce TDX keynote remotely this time. Patrick Stokes driving on stage. Early appearance of the iconic golden hoodie, bestowed on Sarah Franklin, former S/f CMO.

Mark Mainstone: AI part of the puzzle, not gospel. Averis: using AI to connect and contextualise finance systems; and to speed things up. But with keen eye on governance.

Mark Mainstone, Chief Operating Officer, The Folio Society: lucky that in a moment when people are prizing physical products, like lovely books, over digital. Hear, hear!

Yoto's Ben Averis, Chief Financial Officer: hardware, content and subscriptions mix is complex to predict etc; and as an early stage company, too.

#SuiteConnect Nicky back on stage, with two customers, The Folio Society and Yoto. Re Folio. One of my favourite Oracle NetSuite customer stories, from 2023: computerweekly.com/news/365534275…

Evan: insight focused AI. Enterprise performance management his example, with new features -- eg AI-assisted account reconciliation. Narrative Insights, with next steps suggested another of their examples.