Monday Morning Impact – March 12

Survey: Conflicting Data on Workplace Diversity

A new report from CompTIA, a suburban Chicago-based IT trade association details reveals contradictory viewpoints on the current state and future goals for workplace diversity.

Nearly eight in ten high-tech industry workers surveyed by the organization say they are satisfied with their organization’s diversity efforts; and 87 percent say they’ve worked in a department comprised of a diverse group of employees in the last year.

At the same time, 45 percent of workers say the tech industry has lagged in promoting diversity, while another third at least partially agree. This position is backed by statistics from the U.S. Equal Employment Commission and other sources, which find a tech industry workforce that’s overwhelmingly white and male, with fewer African Americans, Hispanics or women than other industries.

One of the more curious findings of the survey relates to gender. Asked if women and men are naturally inclined to succeed in roles that amplify their gender traits, nearly half of respondents agreed. But among executives and senior managers, 61 percent agreed with the statement, compared with 46 percent of middle managers and 22 percent of staff-level workers.

The industry’s gender gap is widest when it comes to pay equity. Two-thirds of women in high tech say they would leave their job if they discovered pay imbalances among employees doing equal work, compared to 44 percent of men who said the same.

A majority of workers feel things are changing, with 59 percent of all respondents saying the industry has made strides toward a more diverse workforce.

CompTIA’s “Diversity in the High-Tech Industry” report is based on two online surveys conducted in December; one to 400 U.S. IT professionals, and the other to 200 workers outside the high-tech industry.

Channel Impact^®
Diversity has gained substantial profile in the tech industry in recent years. Many companies are working proactively to achieve greater balance.

Cylance and ConnectWise Partner for AI-Driven Cybersecurity

Cylance Inc. has announced a new partnership, making the Irvine, California-based antivirus and endpoint protection vendor’s offerings available to more than 21,000 MSPs through the ConnectWise Marketplace. The partnership connects CylancePROTECT and CylanceOPTICS with ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate, enabling enhanced management, remote monitoring and deployment, as well as ticketing and alerts.

“Businesses are proactively looking to MSPs to manage and control their environments, while incorporating security expertise into the offering,” said Didi Dayton, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at Cylance. “The new partnership will equip the extensive ConnectWise partner base with AI-powered endpoint protection to silently help customers prevent cyberattacks, rather than react to breaches after damage has been caused, and without the user or their business being interrupted.”

Cylance uses artificial intelligence to deliver prevention-first, predictive security products and specialized security services addressing malware, ransomware, fileless malware, malicious scripts, weaponized docs, and other attack vectors.

Channel Impact^®
Security has become a top priority among both enterprise companies and SMBs. Managed service providers taking advantage of the partnership can now easily deploy Cylance endpoint protection technologies across their customer base.

Tenable and ServiceNow Form Security Alliance to Reduce Cyber Risk

Tenable, Inc. and ServiceNow have rolled out a new alliance linking the Tenable Cyber Exposure Platform with ServiceNow’s security operations.

The combined solution is intended to enhance security visibility by automatically discovering IT, Cloud, and IoT assets, assessing potential vulnerabilities, linking vulnerabilities with an asset’s business criticality, and prioritizing issues based on this data to accelerate remediation. Joint customers can run automated workflows to solve their most vulnerable items first. In addition, the integration can trigger an automatic re-assessment of the asset to provide validation that the issues were sufficiently resolved, creating a complete, closed-loop remediation process.

“Security teams can’t declare ‘mission accomplished’ after the vulnerability scan alone,” said Sean Convery, general manager of ServiceNow’s security business. “Together, Tenable and ServiceNow give customers an understanding of business impact and security risk, so patching and other response actions can have maximum impact and accelerate remediation.”

The integration is available today between Tenable SecurityCenter and ServiceNow Security Operations on the ServiceNow Store, and it is expected to become available between Tenable.io and ServiceNow Security Operations later this year.

Channel Impact^®
Digital transformation has led to a proliferation of technologies and computing platforms, which, in turn, has led to a growing number of security blind spots. This alliance is intended to mitigate this issue and break down organizational silos separating security and IT teams.