Fix What Matters: Qualys CEO on Prioritizing Cyber Risk

Cybersecurity is a risk management function, so why are most teams still measured on how many vulnerabilities they find instead of how much business loss they prevent? Steve Lasky, Editorial Director of the Security Group at Endeavor Business Media, sits down with Sumedh Thakar, President and CEO of Qualys, at the company’s ROCon conference in Austin, Texas. They discuss how security organizations can move from identifying vulnerabilities to understanding which exposures are actual, exploitable business risks, and why that shift matters more as AI accelerates both attacks and defense. Chapters 00:00 Introduction 01:48 From vulnerabilities to business risk 03:13 Selling risk, not fear 04:47 SOC vs. ROC 06:36 The airbags and brakes analogy 07:18 Is autonomous remediation realistic? 09:30 Building confidence to patch faster 10:01 Lessons from 170 million patches 11:56 What "vendor-neutral" means 14:14 Useful vs. unacceptable autonomy 15:37 Autonomous vs. human-caused outages 16:01 What the industry got wrong 17:47 Mitigate, accept, transfer 18:19 Closing thoughts SecurityInfoWatch: https://www.securityinfowatch.com/ Qualys: https://www.qualys.com/ #Cybersecurity #ArtificialIntelligence #RiskManagement #Qualys #VulnerabilityManagement #CyberRisk #AutonomousRemediation #SecurityOperations #RiskOperationsCenter #InfoSec