CRA’s 5-year anniversary is a great opportunity to reflect on our journey so far and to appreciate the way CRA’s vision has come to fruition, and I’ve been invited to share some thoughts about what’s next for CRA as we look ahead to the next five years.
In his recent blog post, CEO and Founder Doug Manoni talked about CRA’s rise from startup to where we are today, touching on some of the industry dynamics that led to CRA’s creation – rapid industry growth, increasing scale and complexity of cyber threats, a complex legal and regulatory environment, and a fragmented information landscape that makes it extremely difficult for professionals to trust much of the information on offer. Cyberrisk Alliance was created to build a platform to serve as an antidote to that fragmentation – a one-stop source of professional development and education for the cybersecurity community, where premium insight can be delivered through powerful brands leveraging the deep subject matter expertise of the community itself.
When looking ahead to the next five years, an important clue to our focus as a team can be found in our new tagline, released to coincide with our anniversary celebrations. “Community-Centered, Data-driven” reaffirms our unwavering commitment to community while making a powerful statement of intent to harness our first-party data to better serve the needs of our community.
CRA has created deep engagement across the community. This year alone, over 30,000 cyber professionals and executives will attend at least one CRA digital and in-person event across the US, through brands including Infosec World, Identiverse; MSSP Alert, and the Official Cybersecurity Summits. A further 450,000 community members will subscribe to at least one SC Media eNewsletter–consuming our award-winning journalism, proprietary research, and practitioner-focused intelligence on our digital network. By year-end of 2023, over 1,200 Fortune 2000 CISOs will be active and engaged members of our Cybersecurity Collaboration Community, while over 700 practitioners, analysts, and innovators will participate as speakers, authors, keynoters, panel moderators, and boardroom members. Finally, over 600 market technology providers will participate as partners, contributors, and supporters of the information we provide on the platform.
These data points are great examples of how the entire community is embracing the vision and leaning in, not only as consumers of the information we provide, but as also producers, moderators, and active participants in a platform designed to make meaningful connections and smart business decisions – either for professional development, strategic decision-making, or making the right choices in selecting products and services.
Thanks to major investment in our technology architecture, CRA can now capture and analyze data generated from the information we produce, share, and consume across our connected network, and use it to facilitate more efficient connections, helping buyers to better articulate their requirements --and sellers to better position their solutions.
From research we know that cybersecurity executives rely on referrals and information from their peers as well as the analyst community, often balancing the anecdotal and community-centered information with the research they obtain from analysts. Our first-party data can reveal how decision-making is constructed within an organization and can encourage marketers to expand their focus beyond the CISO to engage with other team members who have greater authority and agency in purchasing decisions. Reading signals and gleaning intent, using data to refine a messaging framework and to select the optimal forum in which to engage – this is what makes the data so potentially valuable.
The emergence of CRA’s first-party data comes at an important time for marketers, as confidence erodes in generic data sources and ABM platforms. The problems faced by the largest data aggregators runs deeper than economic headwinds and reduced marketing budgets – the problem is one of trust, as marketers seek data created by providers that are embedded in their markets and who can demonstrate a deep understanding of the community and what it seeks.
As we continue to build CyberRisk Alliance and expand its capabilities over the next five years, we will continue to serve and scale our communities, invest in our brands, and build services and solutions that facilitate efficient and credible connections between buyers and sellers, including expanding our data products and tools, and expanding the range of creative services to help marketers develop, refine and deliver their messaging to our audiences.
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