ISTARI Compass – guiding towards cybersecurity community

By Joel-Oskar Raisanen

Building cybersecurity ecosystems is fundamental to Paladin's mission. By cultivating partnerships and by engaging actively in the cybersecurity community, we collectively create a collaborative environment that promotes knowledge sharing, best practices, and enhanced digital resiliency.

ISTARI, founded in 2020 by the Singaporean investment company Temasek, oversees almost $300bn of assets and has become one such close partner to Paladin. Temasek set up ISTARI having realized that cybersecurity could pose an existential threat to its global portfolio, and ISTARI has since dedicated its resources to helping to build businesses that further cybersecurity preparedness. Today, just a few years after founding, they focus on accelerating their clients' journey towards cyber resiliency through strategic advisory, capital, and world-class cyber training programs.

Since ISTARI's founding, Paladin has been part of their carefully cultivated community most notably participating and contributing to their annual flagship summit, Compass, organized in London in July. This annual three-day event brings together countless cyber security executives, policy makers and business leaders to share insights, drive thought leadership and take collective action on matters related to cybersecurity.

This year's theme was 'Building Resiliency at the time of Uncertainty' drawing topics from the colorful year of 2023 that saw a shifting geopolitical landscape, the rise of AI and an increasingly elevated role for the cybersecurity executive. With high-profile speakers such as the Tom Standage, the Deputy Editor from the Economist, and David Rowan, the Editor-in-Chief from WIRED together with countless others, the quality of the discussion that filled the halls of the Lancaster Hotel offered an unparalleled vantage point to the most pressing current matters in cybersecurity including upcoming elections, boardroom cyber readiness, and counterintelligence.

Highlights included a conversation on stage between our own strategic advisors Chris Inglis, the former US National Cyber Director and Deputy Director at the NSA, and Sir David Omand, the former Director of the UK's Intelligence Agency GCHQ, who spoke in depth on the cyber ecosystem's most current leadership challenges. We are privileged to have both Mr. Inglis and Sir David on the team and their session was deluged with questions from the audience.

We at Paladin also contribute by hosting a small community workshop for the participants. This year, Ken Pentimonti and I hosted a session on secure AI sharing our perspectives on where we are in the market cycle, how much of it is hype and how much is here to stay. The workshop spurred incredible great debate among the CISOs attending. Most are exploring use cases within their organizations but are also still very early on that journey. How to secure AI was a central part of the exploration, although finding proven commercial business cases for machine learning seems to be taking precedence over security for the time being. As is often the case with any new technology, companies, and especially CISOs, are required to balance agile exploration and sufficient protective guard rails.

Finally, the event proved a great opportunity for us to cultivate our existing network and form new relationships within the cybersecurity community. We have a great circle of CISOs and cybersecurity executives within our European and global network and we are excited to continue adding into that community. Those CISOs share invaluable commercial perspectives on the issues and problems they face, and we involve them into our due diligence processes giving them on occasion an early look into some of the most frontier cybersecurity software in the world. Our next CISO event will be in London in September and should any readers be a CISO looking to get involved, don't hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected].

ISTARI Compass proved once again to be one of the highest quality events for the cybersecurity ecosystem. With every detail thought out and a compelling group of world-class participants, every single hour was spent wisely. We at Paladin look forward to expanding our partnership with ISTARI to create a more secure and resilient digital ecosystem for everyone and to contribute to the event next year again.