AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report: Edge Ecosystem

The talk presents the AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report, a vendor-neutral study now in its twelfth edition. The research drew on a global field survey of 1,418 respondents in security, IT, application development and line-of-business roles, supplemented by qualitative input from industry experts. Seven verticals were covered, including healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing, energy, transportation and public sector.

The speaker defined edge computing as software-defined workloads hosted close to where data is generated and consumed, managed through a distributed model. Respondents reported endpoints beyond the usual laptops and phones, such as robots, wearables and autonomous drones. Key findings included security budgets planned roughly on par with applications, network and strategy, heavy reliance on outside advisers, and an average of about 71 percent bringing in third-party help once systems reached production. Respondents ranked denial of service as their top attack concern while rating patching and DoS defenses as low priority, which the speaker described as legacy thinking.

The closing section walked through example use cases such as video-based quality inspection, smart building management and real-time fraud protection, and stressed that a widening attack surface makes resilience essential. The practical advice was to start from the business outcome, align internal stakeholders, bring in trusted partners and plan for dynamic cyber resilience. The vertical reports and printed copies of the report were offered to attendees.