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When you've got production assets running in the cloud CNAPP is necessary, but is it sufficient? Curious to hear other's thoughts on the 2024 Gartner CNAPP Market Guide.

I was looking at a client's DNS configurations for MX records and noticed that they have just one entry: smtp.google.com At first I thought this was a mistake, but apparently after April 2023 this is now the recommended setting. One record with a "weight" of "1." I've been managing and configuring SMTP services and DNS records for 30+ years and I've always believed (and seen the belief reinforced over time) that DNS is a SPoF (Single Point of Failure) for many organizations. The most impressive outage of the last few years was in October 2021 when folks at Facebook instantly took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with one mistaken BGP configuration change. Question: Why would Google have put all of their DNS eggs in one basket? Meaning, all of their DNS services behind smtp.google.com (in IPv4 at least) seem to live within one ASN: 15169 with over 11 million IP addresses. They seem exposed to a BGP outage and/or BGP hijacking attack with this setup.

References: Google Workspace MX record values 9 & MxToolbox (asn:15169)

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What is some “Q4 wisdom” you’ve received in your career that you like to impart on your team to help get them through the busy/stressful holiday season?

CISO here at a large enterprise—between NIS2, DORA, the Cyber Resilience Act, and growing internal pressure around shadow AI and ransomware response, it feels like we’re constantly balancing compliance overhead with real operational risk. What’s the one thing you’re losing the most sleep over in 2025?

Mike Wilkes, Adjunct Professor at NYU at New York University | Gartner Peer Community