ALM Intelligence's Laura Becker caught up with Booz Allen's Anil Markose, a leader of the firm's Commercial Capability Delivery Practice, focused on Cyber Defense, Cyber Strategy, Analytics and Managed Threat Services to discuss the firm's approach to cybersecurity consulting.
ALM Intelligence: Describe Booz Allen's commitment to commercial cybersecurity consulting markets.
Markose: Cybersecurity is an inherently global challenge and Booz Allen is well positioned as a differentiated market leader. Global firms ask for us to tackle their most challenging, highest consequence problems. Our Commercial team is led by seasoned security leaders with private sector consulting experience. We chose Booz Allen because we recognized a gap in the commercial cyber market that Booz Allen uniquely addresses because of our heritage and our deeply talented and skilled cyber practitioners. Our decision to focus on only Cyber in the Commercial Market is a real testament to our commitment to this market and our belief we can impact the problem space with deep expertise and focus.
ALM Intelligence: How do you see the market growing over the next 3-5 years; and how will Booz Allen invest in that growth?
Markose: Cyber is a core part of our brand and market identity. We don't just see cyber as an additional service offering– it is our only focus in the commercial market. As a result, we stay at the tip of the spear to maintain our competitive advantage with our skilled cyber practitioners. Our deep insights are reflected, as an example, in our recently released Cyber Threat Trends report that captures what we anticipate in 2019. We offer our recommendations for how to address the changing threat landscape. Some of the key areas where we see increased demand is in addressing the increased attack surface within mission critical parts of the business. Attack surface disruptors like business digitalization leading to rapid adoption of the Cloud, and new attacks targeting softer parts of the environment like Operational Technologies, Connected Products and the Supply Chain are all creating new cyber challenges. These are more complex challenges for many of our clients and we are investing in consulting assets and technologies to help clients accelerate their transformations, as well as offering our clients various ways to consume our services from traditional consulting to purpose-built solutions to high end managed services to address the talent shortage. Partnering with our clients to solve mission critical issues allows us to optimize how we utilize highly skilled talent with tradecraft and technology innovations to solve the client problems.
ALM Intelligence: Can you elaborate on Booz Allen Hamilton's focus on threat intelligence-based security vs addressing compliance.
Markose: We believe if security is done correctly, the intent of compliance will be met. However, the inverse of that statement is not true. We are in the business of protecting our clients from very sophisticated adversaries and the attackers don't play by the rules. Instead of starting with a compliance framework and mindset, we prefer to start with threat intelligence as our foundation. What should the client really try to prevent, detect and respond to? Decades in the intel business has taught us that the best way to make an informed decision about where to focus limited investments in security should be based on real world, organization-relevant threat intelligence. We start there and advise our clients on how to maximize their ROI to mitigate real world cyber threats.
ALM Intelligence: What is the range of your key buyers in client organizations and how do you see this differentiating you from competitors?
Markose: We are seeing a real shift here. Historically, we have connected at the technical levels of the organization—as a practitioner-led organization with hands-on expertise. However, more recently, we've seen a demand-shift for the practitioner perspective at the Board and C-Levels. Organizations are buying lots of tools to meet various compliance requirements, but do not feel any safer today than they did a year ago. Our senior customers value our candid advice and our desire to only be involved where we can make a difference—the desire to be the best in the market creates a high bar for the brand and a trust with our clients that we take very seriously.
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