Yeah, my talk is about the future of cyber security, cyber security trends. So we, we have actually started a year ago to think about, okay, what are upcoming trends topics also to, to put on the agenda, cetera, cetera. And you may ask yourself, how do they do this? And the, obviously we have own research. So Martin is our head of research. So we do a lot of research throughout the year, talk to many vendors, all relevant vendors in the space of cybersecurity. So we get lots of insights there, but then we said, okay, is this good enough? And we said, let's also talk to our community. We have 30,000 people as part of our community. And we said, why don't we use the, these people to help us understand what's going on in the cyber security space? And when you, when you, when you take this year. So we, we organized throughout this year 20 or 20 events, this all in all over 5,000 participants. And we said, okay, let's, let's talk to these guys. These, these are the security experts. What do they have to say? What they wanna share us and, and let's mirror what we think, and then come up with, with, with the future trends. And this is exactly what we did. And we, we asked them three simple questions.
Question number one was, what are the dominating? The three dominating threats in cybersecurity. You think you are, you, you, your organization has to fear. So what are the, what are the three top things? Now, when I share the first one, I would assume no one is surprised, first of all, and you may also perhaps say, oh, I don't need Analyst Analyst company to tell me that. Yeah, a simple Google research. Would've done the job as well. Right? Of course I'm aware of that. But of course, that was also, and it's no surprise. Of course, the, the number one selection of the people we asked, but they came back with some more topics.
Of course ransomware was, was, was most. But the second topic on the list now is supply chain, risk, supply chain security. We did that research or that poll that survey last year already. And last year, this was not on the list. At least not from all experts. However, we always also ask the CSOs itself and, and the CSOs actually, they had that on the list already last year. And we did that in a year ago, November, October, November, I believe. And you may remember that what happened in December, it kept us all a little bit busy over Christmas and year end, solar wins proof of concept. Right? So, so that was, that was the case. And we've seen more cases colonial pipeline and others, which fit into that pattern. So that is the second, the second threat people are seeing. And then when you go further down the list, of course we only listed the top five. There are a lot more, of course, but then you see the, the normal suspect, like insider threat, like email compromise. Of course they all hang together. Email compromise often also used for ransomware texts. So it's not completely independent, but that are the normal things you would expect on such a list.
All right. So that was the first question we ask. And of course we, we, we try to make sure that this is on the agenda today. We had a, an entire workshop yesterday, over three hours on ransomware. So this will be a topic in, in, in multiple sessions today or tomorrow. So then of course we ask people, what do you do against all this? Or what, what are your dominating? The five, or I think the three dominating initiatives projects in your company right now, which are ongoing. What is this?
The answer we got is this. So yeah, the people, I think what's, what's your take here. The people are all over the place with what do they do, right? So they use lots of technologies, lots of initiatives. We really couldn't figure out a clear, a clear pattern here. It seems that a lot of people still have identity and access very high on their list. So there are a couple of initiatives mentioned there, zero trust is more and more popular, and that was not the case last year, but this is now people are working on it. So that's, that's a topic. And then you see all kinds of other topics, you name it. So lots of tools are, are used. People like tools. Yeah. And now comes the thing. Then we ask the third question. The third question was, what are your biggest challenges when you implement cybersecurity in your organization? So what does it make really difficult?
And now look at the number one, that's what people came back, too many tools. How does this fit? So we need all these tools and now people say we have too many, right? What, what's the explanation for that? Actually, I'm interested to have discussions with all of you about this topic. My take is there's nothing wrong with tools, of course, but we obviously don't get enough out of the tools we are using. So sometimes they may not be well implemented. Sometimes they will, may not well be architected. Sometimes they have overlaps whatever, but we don't get enough out of the tools. And I think that's a topic we should, we should discuss in the next couple of days because that's, that's very interesting.
The second thing, obviously, skills shortage is, is a big topic. We have that on the agenda as well in the next, in the next days then of course, budget is a, is an old classic siloed organization. And, and again, that is of course not a new problem and yeah, stakeholder commitment, four of the five have nothing to do with technology. And this is a cybersecurity conference. So that's also interesting. I see, I think good. I told you that, that we asked the CSO last year and I also have to inform you. We have a cybersecurity council in place with over 15 CSOs coming from well known companies, big companies, usually from mainly Europe and the us. And of course, we also have these kind of discussions with, with, with a group of people there and they more or less resonated with most of what I shared with us. Well, except they added one more topic.
And of course you may have missed that on the list anyways, already. And that is about move, move into the cloud and everything. What, what is related to it and what comes with the, with the move into the cloud is, is of course also on the one hand, it makes it simpler to do our job because the cloud providers, they already bring a lot of security features with them. On the other hand, it makes things also much more complex because on-prem, doesn't go away. And then we have one cloud or two clouds or three clouds or even more clouds. And they all have somehow worked together and the tax surface has increased now. So what do we do? And, and that's a big concern as you can see for the CSOs. And this is the reason why I said let's have a discussion with, with these guys. And I think it's now a good time to, to ask my colleagues to come on stage for the panel discussion around these topics.
