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The Cybersecurity Industry Is Entering Its Third Era
I remember when a security architecture discussion could spend an hour debating one question: where do we put the firewall?
It sounds almost quaint now. The network had an inside and an outside. Applications lived on servers we could point to. Users connected through corporate networks. Security teams built layers around those environments and spent a lot of time deciding which ports should be open, which networks could communicate and who could connect remotely.
Then cloud computing arrived, and suddenly developers could deploy an application without buying a server. Applications became collections of APIs, containers, serverless functions, managed databases and SaaS services spread across regions and accounts. Infrastructure became code, deployment became continuous, and a badly configured IAM policy could suddenly matter more than an entire rack of firewalls.
Cybersecurity had to reinvent itself .. and I think we’re about to do it again.
For most of modern cybersecurity, I think you can roughly divide the industry into three eras: the Infrastructure Era, the Cloud Era, and now the Agentic AI Era.
This isn’t simply another technology security teams have to protect. Agentic AI changes the systems we’re securing, the attackers we’re defending against and, increasingly, the way cybersecurity work itself gets done.
That combination is what makes this transition so important.
