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As I complete six months at RSA, I wanted to reflect upon a critical decision I made a number of years ago that eventually led me here. I had been at a large tech company and over the years fostered great relationships within the company allowing me to establish myself. As a whole, the company was doing phenomenal. It had a well-known brand and was awash with cash. Yet something felt amiss. The threat landscape was rapidly evolving. Our customers were getting compromised too often, increasingly from targeted threats. And building a better mousetrap was a temporary measure at best. My manager, a successful serial entrepreneur, had left to contemplate a new venture. Some time thereafter, he asked me join him on a quest to rethink fundamental problems in security. The prospect filled me with trepidation and excitement. Trepidation because the status quo felt deceptively safe. Could I cast the safety net of a large stable company where I was making a name for myself and walk the tightrope that is start-up life? Yet excitement stemmed from the prospect of tackling the “right” problems. I made the leap. It was both more exhilarating and terrifying than I had imagined. Eventually Sourcefire acquired us (and a few years later, Cisco acquired them). Along the way I gained tremendous experience in envisioning new product lines, meeting with practitioners, and constantly rethinking how the security industry should evolve. Those experiences lit the path for my role at RSA. But the journey itself was far from easy. Even a few years ago, we had to convince people that we were actually addressing relevant problems and that cybersecurity had to be done differently. The status quo solutions ostensibly appeared sufficient and even forward thinking venture capitalists were more inclined to throw money at buzzwords like social networking, cloud, and big data. Fast forward and cybersecurity is trendy. Start-ups are getting ridiculous amounts of funding. And while it’s great to see the field finally burgeoning, the plethora of offerings has created massive confusion in the market. Most start-ups lack folks with any serious security DNA, which hurts our customers because they’re getting mixed messages. The good news is that the opportunity before us at RSA simply couldn’t be any better. In my conversations with customers, it’s clear that we’re solving relevant problems. Every customer I’ve talked to has some existing project that we have the means to fulfill with one of our products across our key strategy areas (Identity, Analytics, and GRC). We couple that with an incredible brand that results in customers being especially receptive to our perspective. At the same, we have challenges. RSA as a company is well known, but our specific product capabilities might not be. Also, customer expectations might not align with actual customer needs, and we have to perform a balancing act being respectfully cognizant of the relevant forces. I’ll delve into these issues in subsequent posts, but it’s clear that no one’s better poised to lead the charge. If not us, then who?
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