Webinar: Bridging Digital Transformation & Cybersecurity
I recently had the opportunity to join Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes, for a webinar on bridging digital transformation and cybersecurity. It is a pairing of topics that too often gets treated as a tug-of-war, and the chance to talk through it with someone who has spent his career on the security side, while I’ve spent mine driving transformation inside operating businesses, made for a conversation I genuinely enjoyed.
The core tension we explored is one every technology leader lives with: transformation expands the attack surface. Every new cloud service, integration, and remote access path creates value and creates exposure at the same time, and pretending otherwise in either direction leads to bad outcomes. Organizations that let security veto everything stall and watch the business route around IT; organizations that sprint ahead without security discipline accumulate risk they only discover at the worst moment. The useful framing, and the one I try to practice, is security as an enabler: build the controls into the transformation work itself, so moving fast and staying safe stop being opposing goals.
I spoke from my own recent experience at Drummond, where we have been running both tracks at once: migrating infrastructure to Azure and modernizing client-facing platforms while simultaneously building out a formal security and compliance program. Doing them together, rather than sequentially, turned out to be the advantage. Compliance requirements gave the transformation work guardrails and a documented baseline, and the transformation gave the security program modern infrastructure to protect instead of legacy sprawl. For mid-market companies especially, where there is no luxury of separate armies for each effort, that integration is not just possible; it is the only realistic path.
My thanks to Marcin and the Malwarebytes team for the invitation and the thoughtful discussion. Conversations that put transformation leaders and security leaders on the same side of the table are still rarer than they should be, and I’d encourage any technology leader wrestling with this balance to seek them out.