Cybersecurity News & Analysis by Cyber Sidekicks - Your Weekly Update’ · Christina Richmond | Rory Duncan - Cybersecurity Experts | Richmond Advisory Group

AI & Policy Management: the customer perspective with Kyle Wickert, Field CTO at AlgoSec

·36 min·2 clips

AlgoSec maps 72,000 historical change requests into about 700 business applications for a European customer.

1. Cyber Sidekicks focuses this week on Lumen's turnaround story and an interview with Kyle Wickert about AI and policy management. 2. Rory Duncan and Christina Richmond host the show, and Kyle Wickert joins as Field CTO at AlgoSec after 13 years at the company. 3. The episode asks how cybersecurity policy, application connectivity, and compliance change when AI, cloud, and multi-vendor environments accelerate business demand. 4. Christina says Lumen brought eight of nine leaders to its Analyst Summit, including Kate Johnson, Chris Stansbury, Ashley Haynes Gaspar, Dave Ward, Anna White, Kai Prigg, Ryan Esdurian, and Mark Hacker. 5. She says Lumen was transparent about finances, showed the good, bad, and ugly, and described a path to positive EBITDA in 2026. 6. She points to the sale of consumer fiber to AT&T, expected to close in 2026, as part of the cash strategy. 7. Christina says Lumen's strategic bet is cloud 2.0, which it ties to AI-driven growth in the data center footprint and exabyte-scale demand. 8. She contrasts cloud 1.0, which relied on hub-and-spoke internet overlays, with cloud 2.0, which needs any-to-any fabric across many metros and distributed data center interconnects. 9. She notes that Lumen is heavily U.S.-focused and says the map excludes Montana and the Dakotas because of density. 10. Rory responds that regional strength and partnerships are common across telco and network providers, especially when coverage varies by market. 11. Kyle says the biggest customer problem is the shocking complexity of multi-vendor environments and connectivity across different enforcement technologies. 12. He says businesses in IT, manufacturing, retail, and finance are being pushed to become IT businesses because applications are digitizing services quickly. 13. He says the time to market for new services has shifted to weeks and days, not months and years. 14. Kyle says many organizations still deliver connectivity through archaic processes, which creates policy drift and shadow IT. 15. He gives examples from UK customers with OpenShift, AWS, Azure, and traditional firewalling all managed in separate silos. 16. Kyle says AlgoSec focuses on security policy across AWS, Azure, GCP, and third-party firewalls such as Palo Alto, Check Point, and Fortinet. 17. He says AI agents are already entering customer discussions, and customers want to integrate them into their own agent workflows. 18. Kyle says customers are asking why AI made a recommendation and what happens when the AI gets it wrong. 19. He says customers in Europe ask about DORA, rule recertification, and application-centric recertification rather than spreadsheet-based reviews. 20. He closes by saying every large enterprise he works with faces these problems, even if they rank only around number 10 on the list.

As heard by us

A practical look at policy drift, shadow IT, and fragmented enforcement across cloud and data center environments.

This episode gives cybersecurity policy management its clearest airing in the guest segment, where Kyle Wickert lays out the friction that shows up when cloud, data center, and application teams move at different speeds.

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Why you'd press play

You want the customer-side reality of AI, policy drift, and cloud sprawl.

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