By Sean Martin & Marco Ciappelli
During our RSA Conference USA 2020 coverage in San Francisco, we connect with keynote speakers, presenters, panelists, organizers, and the InfoSec community to keep the conversation going. This is one of those chats.
Does your business and security strategy include diversity and inclusion? No? It might be time to go back to the drawing board.
If you are reading this, I am assuming you are human.
As a human being, I am also going to think that we share many traits—both physical and behavioral. I am also going to assume that we are very, very different people.
One thing that we tend to forget is that what makes humanity so special is the incredible diversity of which it is made. We're all so similar and yet so different from one another. The problem is that most of us don't want to see or accept that cultural diversity is the greatest strength of humanity and one of our most significant assets for our species and our societies. Diversity is what helped us survive, evolve, and allow for all the achievements of humanity possible.
In this conversation, we are going to focus on the value of diversity for our industry—cybersecurity—and we will leave the anthropological, sociological, and philosophical discussions for another time and another place.
Chloé Messdaghi and Angel Grant joined us during RSA Conference to discuss the value of diversity and inclusion as a means to build strong teams, products, and solutions—and to attempt to understand why, at the same time, it represents such a big problem for so many.
Diversity is not just about the way we look, our gender, our beliefs, and our abilities; it is about the way we think and the way we experience things—this applies to every one of us, you included. Different socio-demographics, upbringings, life experiences, academic paths, working careers, and even our personalities make our individuality valuable in a unique and irreplaceable way.
Cybersecurity is a field that has grown to embrace almost every aspect of our businesses and our society. To succeed against the variety of adversaries and threats that attack us, we need to include and leverage the same diversity the bad actors are embracing (even if unknowingly) if we want to have a chance to win.
If you are interested in understanding why diversity and inclusion are one of the most significant values for your company and your team, how you can make it part of your hiring process, how to leverage it in your day-to-day operations, then this is going to be a conversation worth your time. If you're not interested, you may not get the results otherwise possible.
Either way, stay open-minded and enjoy it.
We discuss this and much more, with our guests:
- Chloé Messdaghi, Vice President of Strategy at Point3 Security, Inc
- Angel Grant, Director of Digital Risk Solutions at RSA Security
