When a production line stops, the financial damage is immediate — and the window to respond safely is narrower than most security teams realize. Rob Demain, CEO and Founder of e2e-assure, joins this Brand Highlight to explain why OT security demands a fundamentally different mindset than IT, and what organizations can do about it.

Operational technology runs the infrastructure that keeps the world moving — manufacturing floors, power grids, air traffic control systems. Rob Demain founded e2e-assure in 2013 and has spent the past seven years narrowing its focus to one discipline: SOC and MDR services. He calls it "specificity" — the principle that doing one thing with precision delivers better outcomes than spreading resources thin.

In IT security, the primary concern is data. In OT, the stakes are entirely different. Downtime is the real threat. For a manufacturing business, minutes of halted production translate directly into significant financial loss. That distinction changes everything about how security teams must respond. The "safety first" rule in OT means responders sometimes have to run alongside a threat rather than immediately neutralize it — because disconnecting systems could halt the production line entirely.

The most common attack path into OT environments runs through IT: adversaries compromise IT first, then move laterally into OT systems. Supply chain risk is the second major vector. Firmware updates, software patches, and third-party management systems all represent potential entry points. Detection takes longer too — OT systems often lack the endpoint tools that trigger fast alerts, leaving threats to surface as subtle pattern deviations over extended periods.

This is a Brand Highlight — a short introductory conversation designed to put a spotlight on the guest and their company. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#highlight

GUEST
Rob Demain, CEO & Founder, e2e-assure
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rob-demain-01733468

RESOURCES
e2e-assure website: https://e2e-assure.com
OT Downtime and Remediation Gaps Research: https://e2e-assure.com

Are you interested in telling your story?
Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥

Walk the floor at RSAC Conference 2026 and you will find boxing rings, petting zoos, agentic AI everywhere, and very few answers to the question that actually matters: why should anyone trust you with their security? Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli have been watching this pattern for more than a decade -- and in this short On Location conversation, they turn the camera on themselves and on the problem they built Studio C60 to solve.

The conversation starts with a pin. A small ITSPmagazine swag item from roughly ten years ago, sitting in Sean's hand at RSAC Conference. Marco traces the thread from there -- back to 2012, back to his first time on the conference floor, back to a joke he made that has never stopped being true: they are still selling the box. The packaging has changed -- servers became SaaS, disks became dashboards -- but the instinct to lead with the product rather than the outcome has not.

Sean frames it cleanly: the messaging is the innovation. But the message only lands when it connects the technology to how teams actually use it, to what that enables the business to do, to why it matters beyond the booth. Marco extends it further: if you sound like everyone else, there is no music -- only noise. Every instrument is playing, but there is no song.

That is the gap Studio C60 exists to close. Drawing on decades of combined experience in cybersecurity, go-to-market strategy, journalism, and brand storytelling, Sean and Marco offer clients something the expo floor rarely demonstrates: the ability to articulate not just what a product does, but what it means -- for the team, for the business, for the people it serves.

The work ranges from a single consulting session to full campaign development and retainer partnerships. It starts with an honest assessment: who are you, who needs you, and what do you sound like right now? For startups especially, that starting point is where everything else begins.

What the floor at RSAC Conference 2026 makes clear, year after year, is that attention is cheap and memory is rare. The brands that last are the ones that earn it -- not with a boxing ring, but with a story worth repeating.

⬥HOSTS⬥

Sean Martin, CISSP -- Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/

Marco Ciappelli -- Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast | https://www.marcociappelli.com/

⬥RESOURCES⬥

RSAC Conference 2026 -- Follow our coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/rsac-2026-conference-san-francisco-usa-cybersecurity-event-infosec-conference-coverage

Studio C60 | https://www.studioc60.com

The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter (Sean Martin) | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Newsletter (Marco Ciappelli) | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7079849705156870144/

On Location | https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

⬥KEYWORDS⬥

sean martin, marco ciappelli, rsac conference 2026, rsac 2026, studio c60, itspmagazine, brand storytelling, cybersecurity marketing, go-to-market strategy, messaging and positioning, agentic ai, expo floor, brand differentiation, content production, cybersecurity branding, on location

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The security industry has spent years debating which tools to buy. Impetum is asking a different question: are the tools you already have actually working? Founded by incident responders who saw the same failures across hundreds of breaches, Impetum built the Persistent Purple Team platform to simulate advanced threat actors inside customer environments on a continuous monthly basis -- not as a one-time engagement, but as an ongoing relationship built around real data, custom TTPs, and a measurable Threat Resilience Score.

Matt Stewart and Alex Grohmann spoke with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli at RSAC Conference 2026 about what they are hearing on the show floor: agentic AI is accelerating the speed of compromise and exposing vulnerabilities in legacy systems that have been dormant for decades. Against that backdrop, the value of knowing -- not assuming -- that your detection and response capabilities hold up becomes critical. The platform builds that knowledge through live-fire exercises using an organization's own data, validating patch management, XDR, SIEM tuning, and post-compromise detection in a way no annual pen test can.

The conversation also touched on the structural talent problem agentic AI is creating inside SOCs. As AI fills the level one analyst role, the pipeline for developing level two analysts and incident responders is narrowing. Impetum sees persistent purple teaming as the training ground that closes that gap -- giving existing teams the repeated, realistic practice they need to respond with confidence when an actual breach begins.

Impetum targets mid-size organizations that have the right security tools but lack the budget, bandwidth, and access to industry events to keep those tools continuously validated against evolving attack paths. For those teams, the platform delivers something an annual report cannot: a documented, ongoing record of what works, what does not, and where the program is heading.

This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight

GUEST
Matt Stewart, Co-Founder, Impetum
Alex Grohmann, Co-Founder, Impetum
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergrohmann/

RESOURCES
Impetum / Persistent Purple Team: https://www.persistentpurpleteam.com
ITSPmagazine RSAC Conference 2026 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/rsac-2026-conference-san-francisco-usa-cybersecurity-event-infosec-conference-coverage

Are you interested in telling your story?
▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight

KEYWORDS
Matt Stewart, Alex Grohmann, Impetum, Persistent Purple Team, Remedium Security, Sean Martin, RSAC Conference 2026, brand spotlight, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, purple teaming, continuous security validation, threat resilience, CISO, security operations, SOC, red team, blue team, incident response, agentic AI, MITRE ATT&CK, penetration testing, cybersecurity

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.