Analyst Profile

Eric Ahlm

Eric Ahlm

Sr Director Analyst

12 years at Gartner,  26 years industry experience

Location:  GA USA  | Language(s):  English

Roles and Responsibilities

In 2023, Mr. Ahlm joined the Gartner for ITL (IT leaders) team covering security operations. In this role, Mr. Ahlm continues his coverage around security operations centers (SOCs) that he has done in years prior on Gartner's GTP (Gartner for technical professionals) team. Mr. Ahlm brings a broad prospective to the security operations domain. He understands market players and trends, buyer considerations, as well as architectural and operational challenges. As such, Mr. Ahlm is comfortable speaking with Security executives, investors, vendor partners, as well as architectural teams. With in security operations, Mr. Ahlm specializes in how to build and operate a SOC, selecting a service provider, SIEM usage including best practice and product selection, the innovative edge of detection stacks such as XDR, incident response, and automation. Top customer challenges Mr. Ahlm helps clients with include expanding threat detection, managing alert fatigue, building automation strategies, developing SOC metrics, selecting best use of security services, increasing SOC performance/maturity. Outside of these core areas of research, Mr. Ahlm follows major trends that have an impact on security operations, such as data science in general, ChatGPT, MITRE ATT&CK, future of soc, advanced automation, micro-services for secops.

Background

Previous Experience

Prior to his role in ITL Eric worked as a researcher director in TS&P team for 8 years, and the GTP team for 3 years. His past research topics included security operations, or generally threat detection and response technologies.

Professional Background

  • Cisco Systems, Security Specialist, 5 years
  • Symantec, Security Partner Channel Manager, 1 year
  • Vigilar, Director of Emerging Technologies, 5 years

Education

  • Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering Technologies (BSEET), 1998

Connect

ANALYST INQUIRY More