Business spending on cybersecurity is growing year by year, as are new attacks and threats. To address these dangers, Nutanix Inc. spends about 10% of its total information-technology operating budget on cybersecurity, with the goal to build resilient architectures and code, according to Wendy M. Pfeiffer (pictured), chief information officer of Nutanix.

“A resilient company is one that build an architecture and a set of tools and services that are focused on knowing that it will be hacked,” she said. “Having the ability to detect those hacks when they’re incoming, and to stop them autonomously is the key to Qualys’ play and the key to what I do as CIO at Nutanix.” In addition to her work at Nutanix, Pfeiffer has been a board member of Qualys Inc. since August 2019.

Resilient architecture and code spending have a dual purpose, Pfeiffer pointed out. “This also makes for performant code; it makes for scalable, supportable code, etc. So, we can do well by doing good in this case.”

Pfeiffer spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Qualys Security Conference in Las Vegas. They discussed how to create a cyberattack-resilient architecture, the challenges of companies choosing from many security solution providers, and the role of machine learning in this scenario. (* Disclosure below.)

The challenge of choosing from multiple vendors

IT portfolio management depends on the risks perceived by the company. CIOs may have the ability, for example, to not protect against anything and just adopt a big, old cybersecurity policy. “Whereas that policy might help us with lawsuits, it wouldn’t necessarily help us with ongoing operations,” Pfeiffer said. “And so it’s somewhere in the middle.”

One of the challenges for enterprises is choosing from hundreds of available products and a plethora of vendors constantly emerging in the space. One solution is to mix the types of vendors, according to Pfeiffer.

“I try to leave room in my portfolio for stealth and emerging technologies, because generally the more modern the technology is, the more it’s keeping pace with the hackers out there and the bad guys out there,” she stated.

There is also an intermediate layer of technologies that involves the ability to operate at scale. “And then there’s sort of the tried-and-true bedrock that hopefully is built into products we consume, everything from public cloud services to hardware and so on,” Pfeiffer said. “We also ensure that anything we ingest meets our design standards.”

Machine learning and artificial intelligence can also help enterprises on the path to cybersecurity. “Adding machine learning to the mix enables us to have IT professionals — who know more than you’d ever imagine about storage and compute and scaling and data and cybersecurity and so on — able to transform that knowledge into code that a machine can read, refine and execute,” she explained.

But there’s also opportunity for the bad guys in this landscape, and it is necessary to have protection against them.

“We need to train the systems, and the systems need to be responsive, performant, resilient, and also they need to have the ability to be augmented,” Pfeiffer said. “And so, suddenly, we go from having this Utopian AI future, where the good-looking male or female robot is the nanny for our kids, to something much more practical that’s already in place.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Qualys Security Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Qualys Security Conference. Neither Qualys Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE