AT&T’s Assistant Vice President of Security Dan Solero sat down with SDxCentral Editor Nancy Liu at AT&T’s Global Headquarters in Dallas, Texas for this episode of 7 Layers.

Solero noted the security industry is facing a lot of pressure due to emerging technologies and modalities, new initiatives in the legislative and regulatory environment, and ongoing talent shortages. 

To address some of those challenges, a few years ago, AT&T announced it will be a public-cloud first company, meaning the first step of its IT strategy is to determine how to get to the cloud, he said.

In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, “we have to have a centralized point of view to monitor what's happening from a security perspective. So we've built our own set of systems leveraging some proprietary technology that we have and commercial off-the-shelf solutions, mainly from the market segment called cloud security posture management. And what that gives us is an ability to have a broad view of our AT&T assets out in multiple clouds and apply consistent standards and detection mechanisms across all of them.”

The tier-one operator also has quantum ready on its roadmap by 2025. “It's so important to be taking action now,” Solero said. “We've declared almost like a call to action within the company, that we need to be ready for quantum risk by a certain time period, [and] we've chosen 2025. And what that means is by the end of 2025, we'll have a good plan and a good awareness of what needs to be done and in what priority order we need to address these issues and have a good understanding of how to take action.”

“We're a couple of years into trying to establish practices and raise awareness within the company that we need a better inventory,” he added. “We need a more complete inventory and information about our encryption usage, where it's used, and what it is protecting. I would say that we're probably within a few months of having a plan established, and then it's all about execution.”

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