The Control Layer

The Control Layer

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The CISO of one: cybersecurity in the rest of the economy

Forty million customers. £600m through the apps. Half the website traffic is teen hackers. The Nando's CISO has no direct reports. The board paper has not caught up.
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The player-coach CISO: how AI rewrote the security leader's job in eighteen months
Three senior UK security leaders rated the change in their roles at eight, eight, and nine out of ten. The job description has been rewritten — has…
 • Amer Altaf
Trust is the growth engine: Vanta's bet that the annual audit is finished
On 7 May 2026 in London, Vanta unveiled an agentic trust platform built around a continuously updated trust graph. The architecture is the right one.
 • Amer Altaf
1:00:06
Trust the agency, not just the agent: a conversation with Vanta's Khush Kashyap
Episode 06 of Amer Altaf's Studio — Vanta's Senior Director of GRC on agentic governance, the talent pipeline, and the Trust Is the Growth Engine series…
 • Amer Altaf
48:25
The Equipment Chokehold: ASML and the end of the allied exemption
A Dutch lithography company in a small town called Veldhoven has become the single most important instrument of American economic statecraft — and the…
 • Amer Altaf
DeepSeek V4 and the death of two monopolies
Two monopolies died on 24 April: NVIDIA's grip on launch-day silicon, and the assumption that frontier-like performance was worth the closed-source…
 • Amer Altaf
The equipment chokehold: ASML, the MATCH Act, and the end of the allied exemption
A Dutch company in Veldhoven has become the most important instrument of American economic statecraft — and the free market that built it has nothing to…
 • Amer Altaf
37:48
The Metal Floor: why you cannot procure sovereignty on imported metal
Aluminium pot lines cannot be cold-started. Helium cannot be synthesised. And the EU Chips Act has not yet costed the physical layer underneath it. Part…
 • Amer Altaf
THE METAL FLOOR: why you cannot procure sovereignty on imported metal
Aluminium and helium are the supply chain layer that cannot be digitised. Neither the EU Chips Act nor UK industrial policy has yet costed an honest…
 • Amer Altaf
27:43
Four Chokepoints: The Fortnight That Made European Technology Sovereignty Unavoidable
Solo episode — Part 1 of the Four Chokepoints series
 • Amer Altaf
The Control Layer
The Control Layer
Where artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and enterprise leadership intersect.
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