Mike Howard, general manager and CSO of Microsoft Corporation, at today’s State of the Industry meeting at ISC West in Las Vegas said,

"My biggest challenge is relevance and leadership. We are living in a new normal, a post recessionary period where funding streams have been eliminated or reduced. Thus, security has to show how relevant we are to the enterprise, what is the value add to the C-suite? Security has to understand that we are business people first and security second, and that's a paradigm shift for the industry."

Also, when asked what should security be prepared for in the future, he said, "The migration to the cloud will be huge, and we are looking into that ourselves. The challenge there will be to figure out how to migrate to the cloud smartly and securely."

Howard is one of Security magazine’s “Most Influential” in last December’s issue. You can read more through Security’s article archive.