My story is a humble one. When I founded SACR almost 5-years ago as just a blog in the midst of the pandemic. It was an experiment in independent research and a desire to share my thoughts. Fast-forward, what started as one curious and passionate cyber researcher writing reports on nights and weekends has grown into a movement followed by 80,000 thousands of practitioners and security leaders around the world. Today, we advise the largest companies globally and have influenced far beyond my imagination. I’m still blown away.
To that end, today, I’m incredibly excited to announce three key crucial updates:
SACR 2.0 Organization
SACR CISO Network
Leadership Note: Welcoming Aqsa Taylor to the Executive Team
Full details can be seen in this video below:
From the early days, the goal was always clear: to make cybersecurity intelligence open, deeper, and more easy to digest. Now, that mission is entering a new phase.
SACR 2.0 marks our transformation from a substack blog publication to a full-fledged research organization. It represents a maturing vision to help security leaders make better decisions. The substack will still remain, but we will provide a wide breadth of research services for all stakeholders!
Welcoming Aqsa Taylor as Chief Research Officer
This is why I’m incredibly proud to welcome Aqsa Taylor as SACR’s Chief Research Officer, a pivotal leader who embodies both depth of expertise and integrity of mission to co-lead this institutionalization of SACR with me.
She was among the early team at Twistlock, where she helped pioneer the container-security market. She later joined Palo Alto Networks, contributing to the launch of their first agentless cloud workload security and helped build the foundations of Prisma cloud compute platform. She spent several years as an early employee and in leadership roles across process-mining technologies and the security data-pipeline space, giving her a unique perspective on cloud, data, and SecOps. Aqsa’s arrival strengthens our ability to deliver world-class research grounded in both technical depth and practitioner depth.
Personally, I’ve known Aqsa for a few years now. She is incredibly personable, kind and proved to be an extremely hardworking professional. The qualities required for our firm to move into its next phase. Those who’ve worked with her consistently describe her the same way: sharp, deep thinker and relentless. Her arrival truly strengthens SACR’s ability to deliver world-class research grounded in both technical rigor and practitioner insight. For example, her first research was our recent SIEM report.
At SACR, she’ll be partnering with me in leading our research arm, working closely with the CISO community and advisory board, and using her product management background in leading our AI research product development – ensuring our innovations stay deeply connected to the needs and realities of security leaders.
SACR 2.0: Expanding Our Mission
SACR 2.0 represents more than a rebrand, it’s a strategic expansion built around two core pillars that will redefine the future of cybersecurity research.
1. Building the CISO Research Arm
Today, we are launching a dedicated CISO Research Arm to serve practitioners, security engineers, and executive leaders. This division will produce field-tested research across cloud, identity, data, and security-operations domains. Our objective is to create evidence-based reports that address the realities CISOs face every day. We want to build an engaging community where CISOs can share information amongst themselves in a space that is void of vendors. Our first event is coming up in California next month (sign up here!)
2. Developing the AI Research Platform for CISOs
The second pillar of SACR 2.0 is our agentic research product purely envisioned for CISOs and for all security practitioners. To this end, we are building an AI research agent purely to serve the challenges that CISOs face today on this market. This product will allow CISOs to explore intelligence interactively - querying vendor landscapes, comparing capabilities, and benchmarking trends through natural-language search. It will combine SACR’s proprietary datasets with analyst-verified content to create an intelligent assistant for security decision-making.
What Comes Next
Every evolution begins with people. Aqsa Taylor’s leadership represents the research excellence we aim to scale. Her background in Cloud Security and SecOps complements our commitment to analytical depth. Together with a growing team of analysts, engineers, and researchers, SACR is redefining what cybersecurity research of modern times looks like and building a platform that blends human expertise with AI-driven precision. This is how we intend to shape the future of cybersecurity research.
Over the coming months, SACR will unveil new research categories, and key initiatives for CISOs. We will continue to publish open research while expanding proprietary tools and frameworks that make sense of the industry’s most complex trends.
Our commitment remains the same: to pursue truth, clarity, and impact in every piece of research we release. SACR 2.0 is more than a milestone. It is a reflection of how far cybersecurity research has come and where it is heading next.
Welcome to SACR 2.0. The story continues!
To everyone who has been reading, sharing, and believing in our work since the beginning - massive thank you!! SACR started as a curiosity, and it became a community because of you. Every post you’ve read, every message you’ve sent, and every discussion you’ve sparked has shaped what SACR has become today.
As we enter this next chapter, SACR 2.0, we’re not just growing, we’re evolving together. The research will go deeper, the insights sharper, and the access broader. But the spirit remains the same: independent, practitioner-led, and committed to truth.
Over the coming months, we’ll be introducing new research categories, new analysts, and new ways for you to interact with our work from exclusive CISO / security leaders roundtables to a variety of formats that bring our research directly into your workflow.
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If you’re a CISO, investor, or practitioner, we invite you to join us as we build the next generation of cybersecurity intelligence.
Please join me in welcoming Aqsa!
If you’ve been with us since the early days, this next phase is for you. If you’re just joining, you’re stepping in at the perfect time.
Stay tuned, stay curious, and thank you for being part of the SACR story!
