By Derek Harp, (CS)²AI Founder, Chairman and Fellow
January, 2021
Happy New Year Colleagues,
It is hard to believe 2020 has finally come and gone as there were moments where it seemed it would never end. What an unprecedented year (to say the least) for our modern society. Like myself, I am sure most of you suffered some unexpected challenges. I hope yours were not too severe, that you also found a few silver linings and that you enjoyed the best of recent holidays with your loved ones. That was the case for my own family and (CS)²AI. During the recent holiday period as we discussed what we are thankful for, we discovered that, even this past year with some disappointments and loss, we still have much to be grateful for.
There were more than a few things that (CS)²AI could celebrate at the end of 2020. One is our committed and growing group of strategic alliance partners and the other is our members growing direct involvement in support our workforce development goals. What started as just a single meetup meeting in Atlanta over five years ago has morphed into the fastest growing control systems cyber security, workforce development/support group in the world. Without more members helping members each quarter we simply could not be doing what we are now! We welcome more feedback, ideas and additions to the global committee teams. Just click here and register your interests or send us an email at Input@cs2ai.org
It is a certain silver lining for (CS)²AI that we were already serving members virtually as most of our 19,000 associate members are distributed all around the globe. With some new found time on our hands, we just dug in to membership requests and simply did more. This was met with so much involvement and positive feedback that we are committed to a much higher operational tempo from here on. Our membership and partner support are now increasing every quarter and our corresponding abilities and outreach are increasing as well. I’d like to share quick summary of some of the (CS)²AI 2020 highlights.
We now have more than 19,000 associate members. We are still adding nearly 1000 associate members a quarter and many of you are choosing to support the organization directly by upgrading to our paid Global Membership level. We will honor that commitment by steadily adding more program and member benefits this year.
We are now regularly adding to our list of member benefits. Benefits include access to our entire recording’s library of past sessions and symposiums as well as discounts to a growing list of industry products or services. If you have a member benefit you would like to extend to our Global Members, please let me know. Our current list of benefits can be found here.
We have expanded our online events in frequency and scope, and our members have responded in ever greater numbers. This includes our first ever Symposium, a half-day of content with a stellar group of leaders in health care cyber security. It was a solid success and established a significant new registration/attendance/attentive level for our organization. As a result, we will hold more Symposiums in 2021. We already have five new monthly (CS)2AI Seminar educational events published for the first quarter of 2021. If you or your company has great continuing education content to share with the membership please contact us at CE@CS2AI.org
This year we added a long-desired (CS)2AI Job Board. The job board serves both our members seeking new opportunities and as a platform for companies looking to hire out of a specific talent pool. Let us know what we can do to improve this tool for you.
We published the first annual (CS)²AI - KPMG Control System Cyber Security Report, a product of our ongoing – and growing – research efforts, which have been strengthened by an increasing number of external SMEs. The report can be downloaded for free and is getting excellent feedback. Work has begun on the 2021 edition. We could not have achieved this goal without the support of our title partner, KPMG and key support from Airbus Cyber, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks
We have begun the project to develop the 2021 report and the steering committee is forming as we speak. It is our goal to complete critical review entire 2020 survey question bank before end of January and launch the 2021 survey shortly thereafter.
During our early years it was sometimes a bit of a hard sales job to get companies to believe in the (CS)²AI vision and I am truly grateful to our first three SAP pioneers, KPMG, Waterfall Security, and Sable Lion Cyber for signing on in our early days and continuing to support us today. They were, of course, shortly followed by others, and today the landscape of our supporters is much broader and increasingly diverse. I cannot thank all of our Strategic Alliance Partners enough. Without you we could not do we what we do.
We are happy to report that over 90% of our SAP’s have or are currently renewing. I am excited to make a difference together and encourage you to thank people you know at these companies for their commitment to workforce development in our industry. Their commitment to the goals and missions of this not for profit go beyond simple marketing ROI. These companies know that when they support (CS)²AI the are directly supporting the most important aspect of our current cyber security challenge; the human beings!
Our newsletter is only in its second year and we have already increased our publication from quarterly to monthly. Along with rapidly increasing circulation we’ve established a solid stream of original articles complementing for the present - and soon to entirely displace - our reprinted content. This is now integrated with our ongoing research projects, including our monthly survey activity.
Each month Daryl Haegley, Director, Mission Assurance & Cyber Deterrence at the Department of Defense and (CS)²AI Fellow submits roughly 8 – 10 articles he believes to be important for our members to read. Those get posted on our blog site as News You Can Use and are published as well in our newsletters. If you want to join the (CS)²AI Editorial Board and contribute to this effort, please email us at Input@cs2ai.org
***Copy and Paste Links****
Get Involved https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved
(CS)²AI Member Benefits https://www.cs2ai.org/member-benefits
(CS)²AI Online™ direct link https://www.cs2ai.org/cs2ai-online
Job Board direct link https://www.cs2ai.org/jobs
2020 Annual Report https://www.cs2ai.org/reports
Strategic Alliance Partners https://www.cs2ai.org/our-strategic-alliance-partners
New You Can Use https://www.cs2ai.org/newsyoucanuse