Help Save the Cybersecurity Research Library!

We released the Cyentia Cybersecurity Research Library over 3.5 years ago with the goal of curating existing industry knowledge to make it more accessible and useful for the community. I’m very proud of the work our team has done since then to make that goal a reality. Here’s a sampling of those accomplishments:

• Upon introduction, the Library held a mere 275 published reports. It now contains 2,400 reports on a variety of topics. That’s nearly 10X growth since we started this little endeavor!
• Speaking of topics – that’s another area where the Library has greatly improved. You can now sort reports by sources and tags as well as search for specific terms (e.g., here’s a bunch of reports covering the COVID-19 pandemic).
• We launched a regular newsletter and Twitter feed of new reports.
• We’ve also worked to make the Library content more visual and connected. For instance, say this EY report on Privacy in the Wake of COVID-19 caught your eye after searching. You’d find a nifty “topic plot” showing which topics appear in the report and where. You could also jump from there to other reports covering those topics or see a list of additional research from EY.

But tooting our horn for past accomplishments isn’t the point of this post. We’re looking to the future and hoping to find help in making the Cybersecurity Research Library an even more valuable resource for the security community. More specifically, we’re seeking one or more sponsors to help fund the Library’s continued operation and development.

What will we do with sponsorship funds?

We want to be very candid about why we’re seeking sponsorship and what we’d do with those funds. To this point, all investments in the Library have been covered by Cyentia. But it’s become increasingly difficult to devote the time and resources necessary to sustain and grow the Library. As a small company, we have to prioritize our client research projects and the Library simply doesn’t get the attention we think it deserves.

Sponsorship funds will allow us to hire resources to proactively find new reports, better contextualize those reports, and more quickly add them to the public Library. Those funds will also cover storage and processing costs associated with the ever-growing corpus of security industry reports. Finally, we’d use sponsorship money for additional maintenance and development of the Library website and back-end infrastructure.

Based on our current expenditures and projections for necessary improvements, we’re seeking $20K in total funding for the Cybersecurity Research Library. We also have a host of ideas for additional features and functionality and we suspect those of you who use the Library might have some too. But we’re starting with the basics and looking to make the Cybersecurity Research Library more than just something we do if/when we’re not under the gun on other projects.

What will the sponsor(s) receive?

We hope the organization(s) that sponsors the Library will receive the appreciation and goodwill of the security community. After all, the Library is ultimately a free resource for us all. Realizing that most organizations will want something more tangible, we will add the sponsor logo(s) to the Library website along with a message from the sponsoring organization(s) explaining why supporting the Library is important to them. If you’re a potential sponsor and have other ideas to make it worth your while, let us know.

We’re Interested – How can we learn more?

Glad you asked! We like to keep things simple, so just email us at [email protected]. We’ll set up a discussion to share what we’re looking to do, hear your ideas, and explore how we can save the Cybersecurity Research Library together. Looking forward to it!