Convergance of Cybersecurity and Cloud Markets – Dan Schiappa, Arctic Wolf

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to Tech strong TV. Our next guest is first time on our show.

His name is Dan. Chiapa and Dan is with arctic wolf. Hey Dan, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you? Excellent.

Welcome. Welcome to techstroke TV. So Dan I mentioned you with article, but other than that, what else?

Can you tell us about Dan Schiappa? Sure. So I've been on the chief product officer here at arctic wolf.

I've been doing cyber for over 20 years in my past cyber lives. I was the head of the window security team at Microsoft for a long time. I was ahead of products at RSA for a while and then prior to articles I was the CPUs cell phones for eight years.

So but kicking around this crazy world for a long time. Yeah, you and me both but you know the good news is I don't think I think the Cyber ended now, it's called The Cyber industry. Of course.

I always called it security or infosec, but our industry has never been stronger in some ways, you know in in terms of I mean, we really do have mine share with with people now, I think more than so in the past. and and the the wide variety of of ways people are You know approaching the problem of cyber. is you know, it's almost like a Cambrian explosion of different kinds of ways we tackle this problem, but you know with the attention it's getting hopefully We'll continue to make progress.

Anyway, though. That's my glass half full for the day. Dad for those of us who or for those in the audience, maybe who aren't familiar with article.

Why don't you give us maybe a Quick, you know kind of elevator pitch there. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you highlighted one of the biggest challenges and security is it Trends change over time?

And sometimes when those Trends change the security challenges change brings different ways to protect things different skill sets that you need to have inside your organization. So what we do is we provide what we call the security operations cloud is so we take all the different technologies that you would use within your own sock. We provide it in a menu of services from things like MDR to manage risk to awareness training to incident response and you know Cloud security posture management a wide variety of technologies that we operate as a sock on the company's behalf.

And and we deliver that through a unique approach that we call the concierge delivery service where it's kind of a white glove treatment and you know, we have thousands and thousands and thousands of customers we built out the technology all homegrown technology to not only provide A lot of Automation and ai-based detections and the like but this ability to scale out this really awesome kind of relationship. We create with our customers that takes them along their security journey is we as I mentioned your security Journeys never over this is the one industry. You can't put your feet up on the desk and go I'm done like we solved all these problems because there's just always new problems.

So we're always there to help them along that security journey and frankly for what they would spend a fraction of money to you know, you know higher their own people build out their own, you know capabilities in house, you know, we can provide an army of experts who can provide the service based, you know build off of, you know, Cutting Edge AI lead technology. Excellent. I you know, it's funny before I started.

com and the boulevard know that my last startup was security company still secure and Boulder and you know after doing that for five six years I came to the conclusion that most organizations Enterprises and down really weren't capable of doing their own security kind of Soup To Nuts. They just didn't have they didn't have the in-house resources expertise tools everything else. And so we sort of pivoted a little bit.

I we bought in mssp. down here in Florida actually, and then we were going to expand that and then 2007 and 8 happened, but You know, I think it's still true today and I think arctic wolf is a great example of it. You know companies organizations need.

A sock and everything that goes, you know, the entire security program that goes with a kind of thing. But they just they to do that yourself. at any kind of scale Most company like maybe a handful of companies can do it.

Right. I mean there's companies, you know and the financial industry and you know health care and Tech they typically have some ability to do that. But what we're even finding is very large sophisticated Enterprises just want to expand what they can do and house with expertise that articles can provide and so even those need help they they need more scale.

Yeah, we talk about the the trouble attracting cybert Talent it's real because the need is so much greater than it was in the past with just the proportionate pool of resources is smaller and smaller over time. And so they tend to kind of unify or on companies like ours where we have you know, over 400 analysts who are you know, you know super deep and and this profession and you're not gonna find those people if you are, you know typical non-tech or finding out this is based Enterprise and so you get that skill set with us. You don't have to worry about it.

It's one of those I go to bed at night. I know articles on it and that's a great sense of relief for most CISO. Agreed agreed it hasn't changed.

So Dan, you know? We live in interesting times I think for the first time but for the first time in many folks in our industry meaning not just cyber but Tech in general we're seeing layoffs. We're seeing you know.

cutbacks or you rounds are down a little bit right and and people are saying my God, you know, I thought Tech was immune to the laws of economics and and Maybe we're seeing it's not quite immune cybersecurity. Of course, you know not a sacred cow there have been. You know budget pressures put on us on on the in the industry.

You would think well the good news is maybe it'll be easier to hire people now, but yeah, that's just not that many people but you know, the secondary part is look when and in the time of budget cutting. How deep do you cut till you cut to the Bone? Yeah, and it hurts.

Yeah security is is is a meat is an immune sector of tech as you can get right? I mean we are almost like a utility, you know, you can't go in your house without electric or water. You know, those are the basic things you need an organizations need cyber.

I think we're the impact comes is they're not going to take as as much chances on, you know, spreading some technology around that maybe more core to them, but they wanted to play around with see how that worked and and do some experimenting so their budgets are gonna be smaller in totality but they're not going to be I think is proportionally cut as some other areas of the business. And so there's a little bit of the community there. But what it does is, you know, it's the old the cream Rises to the top.

I think the companies that are gonna be perceived as you know mandatory, you know Tech areas or or the leaders and those Tech areas. They're gonna continue to do pretty well. I think you saw some of the earnings reports come out from some of those vendors.

They there's continuing Do very well I think that will be the trend I think, you know some of the some of the startups maybe that would have had an opportunity to squeeze some budget out and get in there and and play around. I think that's gonna be where some of the struggles are going to be with limited budget. There's more eyeballs on getting that budget approved.

So the sales Cycles take longer, but also they're gonna scrutinize who the vendors are that they pick they're gonna make sure they're spending money on the top vendors in the market and that that's a trend we've we've seen in the past and I think we're seeing that Trend now. a great agreed You know and and we've seen it in the past. We definitely have the issue I think becomes though.

How much can you slow down procurement? How much can you slow down growth or you know? continue to evolvement of your cyber capabilities until until it hits home.

right, and you know what's Crappy about the whole thing. It's hard to say. Oh, this would not have happened had we right because every security vendor in the world after a good breach.

Floods your email box with had they been using our stuff. This wouldn't have happened yet nonsense, right but At what point does it really say? Hey it wouldn't have happened not, you know had not been just for this.

Yeah, I mean, I I think this is again where companies will tend to pick the key technical areas that they feel given the most coverage and pick some top tier vendors and though so is a fellow Floridian, you know that when you know Energy prices go up maybe able to crank the AC down a little bit but you're not turning it off. Right? And so yeah cyber is like Floridian AC where you can crank it down a little bit but you can't crank it down too far or you will get uncomfortable.

And so I think you know people look at the tax services, they need to have coverage on the try and limit, you know to a few vendors so they can consolidate their spend within a handful of vendors. They're gonna want to make those vendors the top tier vendors in those categories that are cost effective as well. So you can't be you know top to your vendor who's really really expensive because that's not gonna fit right in this budget cycle.

But so I do think you know proportionate the spending will come down a little bit but they're gonna not be able to cut it to an uncomfortable level and if they do you're The risk is I'm gonna have an impact from a from a cyber issue that's going to be far greater than what I would have spent to protect myself from that to begin with. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's just the case the case the thing and you know, there's always a bit of a pendulum that swings between, you know, best of breed one throat to choke kind of thing.

Because here's an interesting comedy to what you're saying dad. in tough Economic Times Like This We usually see the new crop the next generation of innovation. Coming forward right companies born in recessions are born in tough times.

Are the next Cycles, you know Big Winners, so there is you know, I I don't want to paint too gloomy a picture for startups or for new companies coming in here. So be opportunity. There will be if you Absolutely, I think as you said I whenever we've seen these kind of recessions happen in the past and the tech industry there are companies that emerge from that because they've created a new way to do something a more efficient more effective more cost-effective way to do that.

And that's that's the whole game in cyber. Right? And so you you know, you will definitely see a lot of startups who are still innovating and creating some some new opportunities and that'll push the entire Market.

That's the great thing about Innovation is when when it starts to get adopted and become effective, you know, everyone else has to adapt and and our industry is kind of an innovator die industry because we're not just competing against other security vendors. We're competing against hacking groups. They are gonna be extremely Innovative.

They're not gonna slow down their Innovation their investment because they don't care about research periods that you know, those hacker groups are still, you know, raking and you know billions of dollars and and so they they have ample, you know capabilities to innovate and we have to innovate alongside them. So there's a great opportunity. For startups and more established companies to have relationships to kind of bring that to Bear.

But yeah, we'll definitely see some really cool new technologies that are led by startups that will emerge in this market. agreed You know, I think just one other area. I wanted to hit and then come back to Arctic Wolf is we're also at a time where we're seeing.

Continued evolution of how we deploy. software and resources in the cloud multi-cloud cloud native Serverless, I mean so many different. Technologies that we're still kind of wrapping our hands around.

How do we secure this? Wait, what what's different in this versus the way we were doing it before and I think that also creates a little bit of flux a little bit of opportunity for organizations to say, maybe we need to look at this differently. Yeah, I think as I mentioned the beginning when there's this transformation happening in it, there's new security issues that typically arise and I think a lot of people when making that move to the cloud we're just pushing their traditional infrastructure into virtual infrastructure in the cloud and then they they went to public cloud and they kind of did the same thing.

They took their workloads and just put them as workloads in the cloud instead of a physical server. And so a lot of the security Paradigm didn't change that much but now you're adopting things like, you know, you know, kubernetes clusters and Lambda serverless environments. Yeah, it definitely changes but security is still there.

Right is the it moves to the cloud. So we're the bad guys gonna move to the cloud and just really basically when you look at and you know, these platforms like AWS Azure gcp Oracle Cloud, they're basically just operating systems in the cloud, right? There's a bunch of services you consume Services communicate to one another you have a data playing all that is You know not a lot different than what was happening in, you know windows and Macos and Linux.

So you have to protect against those those types of attacks because now you know, all of your stuff is certainly public facing when you when you Embrace public Cloud infrastructure and so the bar even gets higher from the security perspective and companies are you know, you know this this journey has been happening for a while now, right but it's really starting I think to kind of hit it's Pinnacle but companies are now like factoring insecurity when they factor in their movement to the cloud where I think in the early Cloud days, they really didn't they kind of got there and figure out okay now, what do I do? But we're seeing customers now. We're just getting ready to make that journey and they're asking us like, how do we make that journey together?

And that's part of what we do with our security Journeys. We identify that and we help them kind of prepare as they make that move to the cloud and and it's I think it's gonna pick up more steam because I've done right? It's very cost effective to put your services in the cloud as well to put your, you know, particularly if you're running your business.

Um, you know off of a private data center today or even just virtualizations for structure. It's gonna probably lower your cost and give you some expansion opportunities. You wouldn't know otherwise had but you really need to work with somebody like an arctic wolf to help you along that Journey.

So you have security when you get there not I'm here. Now what? a great Dan we're almost out of time here actually probably over time for people who want to find out more about article.

Where can we send them? com. Once you get there, you'll see kind of the breath of offerings that we have and and the unique way that we deliver it, you know providing the security operations Cloud through, you know, a large number of Security Professionals and experts that, you know, build unique technology to deliver the service but also deliver it with unique Technologies think they'll be pretty excited when they see the breath of the offerings that they can get from us.

Very cool. Hey Dan. Thanks for coming on here and chatting today.

Appreciate. Thank you for having me. It was awesome.

Good. To talk to someone who's been around, you know as well. So it's always always nice.

Hey come back anytime and keep us posted. Okay? I need to do so.

All right, then she opera Chief product officer at article here on Tech stroke TV. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.