Most Worrisome in 2022

Channel Futures: In terms of the threat landscape, what’s most worrisome in 2022?

Palo Alto’s Karl Soderlund: There are three things that worry me in 2022, and some of these are kind of a continuation of 2021, but it’s relevant. One is just the sheer number of disparate security technologies that customers have in their environment. They work independently. Unfortunately, this opens up a lot of attack surfaces. It introduces blind spots for customers and there’s a threat there. So that’s a complex problem that we have. Palo Alto Networks is trying to work with our partners and customers to help them with that.

No. 2 would be the amount of manual processes that are still involved in security operations. The more human operators we have, the more opportunity there is for errors, mistakes, misconfigurations and again opening ourselves up for attacks.

And then the third is the the global talent shortage for cybersecurity that’s out there in the market space right now. There are too little resources to make sure that these technologies that customers are buying are getting deployed correctly and in the manner that they were built. So I see those as the three most complex problems that we’re going to face moving forward. And if I think about Palo Alto Networks, what we’re doing to help with that is quite a bit for our partners. So we’re trying to bring simplicity to a complex problem.