As we continue to evolve our perspective on the security market, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve brought on security expert (and my former Netflix colleague) Bill Burns to help us better understand the minds of security-minded CIOs and their Chief Information Security Officers and how they maneuver the technical and business landscape to keep their companies safe and secure. Bill has 20 years of industry experience in information security architecture and IT operations, specializing in cryptography, business processes automation, and risk-based decision making.
Most recently, Bill was the Director of Information Security for Netflix, Inc. His team supported the development of over 1,000 streaming devices, enabled Netflix members to stream over 1 billion hours of entertainment per month, and ensured audit and regulatory compliance across a global public/private cloud environment. Bill’s team protected Netflix employees and members by continuously testing and monitoring systems for vulnerabilities and anomalies. They partnered with internal customers, outside partners and innovative startups to create resilient security infrastructure and services. Bill is an active advisor to several security startups, and is member of the RSA Conference Program Committee, ISSA CISO Forum Advisory Committee and ISSA CISO Career Lifecycle Committee.
For many years now at ScaleVP, we’ve recognized security as a ripe investment opportunity and have have invested in innovative security companies like Zone Labs (acquired by CheckPoint), ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco), FrontBridge (acquired by Microsoft), and TripWire (acquired by Thoma Bravo).
A number of major business and technology trends are shifting the security landscape and invigorating innovation and focus in the security market. BYOD, public cloud hosted services and SaaS applications are moving business data outside of the corporate firewall. Enterprises are increasingly moving business workflows to cloud, with SaaS spending growing 3x faster than other applications and IaaS CAGR topping 41% growth through 2016. By 2017, Gartner predicts half of all employers will require employees to bring their own device to work. Trends in enterprise compromises indicate that traditional security controls such as perimeter firewalls and signature-based security approaches have become less effective at protecting enterprises against well-funded adversaries, malicious insiders, and growing technology complexity.
Bill sees two main transitions that are impacting security:
1. Shift to Holistic, Automated Approach
Companies are moving from point solutions that address specific threats and vulnerabilities to a more holistic and automated approach. These provide a better understanding of business risks and add visibility in order to put better controls around them.
2. Empower Entire Organization to Focus on Security
Much like the focus of Bill’s team at Netflix, InfoSec teams are empowering the entire enterprise to be security-aware, so everyone thinks about security.
“Business is about taking risks and InfoSec teams need better tools to help companies take smart risks. Security teams can no longer focus on a ‘protect the castle’ mindset – corporate data AND infrastructure are now outside the firewall, and employees are doing meaningful work from their own devices. Rather than try to keep everyone out, security models have evolved to ‘assume they are going to break in’ and have a plan for what to do about it. Security teams are shifting their budgets from largely preventative controls to a mix of prevention, sophisticated detection and coordinated response in order to keep the organization more resilient.”
We’re thrilled to have Bill join the ScaleVP team and we remain excited about new opportunities in security that help enterprises address these new trends. If you are building new security solutions that address these trends, we would love to talk to you.
