Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware closed last week. This is a landmark moment for Carbon Black, and I wanted to lay out what it means for our customers, partners, employees, and the industry at large.
As of today, Carbon Black is now an autonomous business unit within Broadcom. This is a development we’ve been working toward for months as we prepare our business for continued and sustained growth.
Our success is dependent on our ability to focus on solving the evolving needs of CISOs, their security teams, and by extension, the organizations they serve. Having the freedom to drive those efforts isn’t just necessary–it’s exciting and invigorating.
And we’re ready for it.
Growing momentum
Thanks to our recent investments to build out our marketing organization, Carbon Black has more momentum than ever. We’ve elevated our brand worldwide. And the results of those efforts are unmistakable.
Last quarter, Carbon Black emerged as a Leader in Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 XDR Report, where we out-positioned virtually all of our fiercest (and frequently much larger) rivals.
On Nov. 2, we kicked off our Next Level CISO Workshop Series in London, which is a powerful way to take our story to C-level executives in key markets throughout the world. The Next Level series also places Carbon Black at the center of an emerging conversation about how status quo defenses increasingly expose organizations to directed attacks, even as compliance and governance obligations grow more complicated and consequential. This is a vital discourse to have with CISOs and their colleagues, and given our direct experience working with top security teams worldwide, it’s a conversation Carbon Black is uniquely qualified to lead.
Next Level, however, is just the beginning. We plan on making a huge splash at RSAC 2024, where we will continue to emphasize the need for persistent visibility, data-driven context and flexible control in today’s threat-rich environment. In fact, we will be telling that story in more than 40 events over the next several months.
At the same time, you’ll see new analyst reports soon that spotlight the impressively beneficial economic impact of Carbon Black solutions at a time when every cybersecurity budget dollar matters.
Addressing real-world needs
Here at Carbon Black, we’re seizing this moment to build on all those efforts in ways that address the tough world CISOs and their teams live in. Ransomware kits and malware have become commodities on the dark web and now can be had for as little as $66. (Given so few cybercriminals are ever prosecuted, it’s little wonder that IT professionals report a 48% increase in ransomware attacks.) All this has created a lopsided economy that wildly favors the attacker: bad actors risk almost nothing and pay so little while those they prey upon risk much and pay dearly. Globally, a successful breach costs an organization $4.45 million on average; in the United States, the financial hit is twice that—an average of $9.4 million. With cloud breaches up 35% in 2022, it’s hardly surprising that 68% of security chiefs fear a “material cyberattack” on their organizations in the next 12 months.
Bad actors, in fact, are counting on a typical SecOps team’s lack of visibility into all endpoints, assets, workloads and networks. They’re looking for those gaps and building ways to exploit them, knowing that deploying one-size-fits-most, “easy button” cybersecurity solutions and too often results in a false sense of security. (Insurers are taking notice, too, hiking cyber insurance premiums by 50%.)
Meanwhile, organizations today face not only a rise in targeted attacks but also the need to prove duty of care—a responsibility to ensure their actions do not harm others. Duty of care obligations have direct implications for how companies defend their assets, customer data, networks, applications and more. These obligations can be far-reaching, involving customers, investors, partners and others. And failure to prove duty of care has serious implications, with fines, loss of reputation and worse waiting for those who aren’t taking this seriously enough.
The Risk Gap–and how we help close it
Every day, we see how SecOps teams fall behind the curve of directed attacks, no matter how much they’ve invested in security tools. And we’ve seen how the intensifying burden of compliance, including proving duty of care, has grown vastly more complex and consequential.
This is the Risk Gap—the growing distance between an organization’s status quo defenses and its exposure to directed attacks and the associated burden of meeting compliance and governance requirements. The Risk Gap exposes not just data and assets, but the business itself. It must be closed.
What’s exciting about this moment is how well Carbon Black is positioned to help CISOs close their Risk Gap. Our solutions equip SecOps teams with the very abilities they need to detect and defeat emerging threats while meeting those reporting obligations. With Carbon Black, organizations can:
- Tailor detection and response to their unique business needs. This is granular customization based on organizational policies, vulnerabilities, integrations and intelligence.
- Acquire deep context on the data that matters, leading to better evidence. This will allow analysts to more rapidly detect and investigate incidents, while providing complete auditable visibility.
- Deploy high enforcement everywhere it makes sense. This includes introducing a positive security model featuring a default/deny approach, leading to tight control and governance and a trusted environment. It also generates less noise that can overwhelm and distract SecOps teams.
- Engage a force multiplier for security teams. Deploying the right solution allows teams to know what’s working. They can enrich existing workflows with better data and open APIs to help surface the incidents and conditions that really need attention and achieve data-driven control.
- Get proactive. A proactive, layered approach to cybersecurity allows teams to make better decisions faster.
We’re just getting started
I could not be more delighted with the progress our team has made these past many months. Nor could I be more excited about our prospects for the future.
For customers, we are committed to providing the same level of support and trusted guidance they’ve come to expect from Carbon Black.
For partners, we have exciting new initiatives to discuss that will continue our commitment to delivering differentiated solutions that create opportunities for all.
And for the industry at large, stay tuned.
Carbon Black is back, and we’re better than ever.
