Describe your current job role and business model?
If you ask ten people what threat intelligence is, you get ten different answers. A big part of my role is to help demystify the concept of cyber threat intelligence, support organisations with building and maturing their capabilities, and importantly making it useful. Mandiant, part of Google Cloud, has decades of experience on the front lines, supporting clients with incident response. That gives a unique insight into the methodology and tools used by cyber-criminal and state-sponsored adversaries.
What are the strengths you bring to this role?
Jongman started his career in law enforcement, in the High-Tech Crime Unit of the National Police of Netherlands, and Europol. He coordinated large-scale, complex international investigations into cybercriminal organisations and devastating cyberattacks. Jongman moved to the Middle East in 2018 and has since worked with governments and organisations to implement cyber threat intelligence programmes.
Please describe expectations and pain points of customers?
The threat landscape is changing so rapidly, organisations struggle to keep up. Everyone in a security function needs reliable, well-researched information to base their decisions on. That is exactly what threat intelligence is. It is highly-dependable security information that comes in many different forms and allows security functions to do their jobs effectively.
Which technologies can make a difference to customers?
One of the most important pieces of advice Jongman gives customers is to make sure the threat intelligence they are bringing in is of high quality. If you bring in bad data, you will only be spending money on making everyone’s job more difficult. A SOC analyst does not want to wade through hundreds of false positive alerts. It will only burn them out.
Developments in the field of artificial intelligence are moving at lightning speed. Having the ability to automate bulk of the responses to those threats is going to be a differentiator for defence teams.
How can a channel partner disrupt the regional market?
If there is one thing a channel partner can do to really make a difference for their clients, it is to look for solutions that will help them operate with confidence and speed. Getting the right data and threat intelligence in is important. It is critical it is part of a well-orchestrated solution that allows analysts, with the help of AI to pivot from incident to resolution.
Which aspects of your job role are rewarding, which challenging?
What Jongman enjoys the most is the ability to work with customers on their individual use cases. Every organisation is different. Each one has a different threat profile and different needs. The challenge of making defenders more effective and efficient in their role within the security function is hugely satisfying. Turning it into something that is making us all safer, is a massive challenge, but important.
