Uniting Infrastructure Engineering and Security – Nick Tausek, Swimlane

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I am really happy to introduce you to my next guest. His name is Nick Taek. Nick is the lead security automation architect over at Swim Lane, and we're gonna find out a lot about that here in just a moment.

Let's first welcome Nick. Nick, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. Thanks very much.

Happy to be here. Happy to have you. So Nick, um, you know, I said you were a lead security automation architect, but yeah, uh, uh, everybody has titles today.

Tell us about yourself. Sure. So I've been in the security space since 2010.

I started off as a network security analyst, uh, back in the days of Snort and, uh, unencrypted traffic. Um, You talk in my language. Yeah, it was, it was the wild west, you know, they were just kind of throwing everyone who had it chops at the security problem and seeing who stuck.

Yep, yep. Um, so that's how I got my start. Um, went, uh, to a couple other places as a network security analyst.

Also did some long-term analysis, um, and I started developing a passion for automation early on. Uh, one of the things that I saw consistently affecting SOX I was working in was that, uh, an over-reliance on manual processes was taking obviously too much time, but it was also causing a lot of inaccuracy and a lot of inconsistency between what various analysts were doing, uh, in the field. So, um, I started teaching myself Python, uh, pretty early on, and, uh, started using that to develop more and more complicated scripts and, uh, eventually, you know, fully automated solutions to, uh, help us handle the workload and, uh, provide consistent results across our team.

Um, worked for a couple MSPs as well. Um, and then about five years ago I came to Swimlane, um, uh, at Swimlane, uh, as the lead security, uh, automations architect. I do, uh, a number of things, uh, but the main purpose of my job is to help my team develop content that we use in a wide variety of customers to solve security automation, um, problems or challenges.

Um, so we do things like from the basic stuff like phishing triage and similar triage, uh, through remediation, through employee onboarding, offboarding, um, even document, um, updates and edits and stuff like that. We, we, we touch a lot of things with automation these days, uh, at Swimlane and, um, that variety of use cases that we're able to perform as not just the company, but in the entire automation space is increasing day by day. Absolutely.

Absolutely, man. Um, you know, just listening to your journey, I, I, I almost, I'm like waxing nostalgic, right? Yeah.

But it's also the journey of where we've come in security, right? We've moved from basically network security analysts sitting there scraping, you know, glass and getting desensitized to, you know, and them being overwhelmed, frankly, to moving towards security automation. And, and now we didn't mention it, but with AI and, and everything, you know, machine learning, ai we're hopefully better than ever or, or making more progress towards this.

Um, before we jump into our big topic today though, wanted to, for people want to get more information about Swimlane, where can we send them? Sure. com is our website.

Um, we've got some demos on there. We've got, uh, some great resources to help you, uh, realize the value of the security automation can provide your organization. Um, and we've got, uh, yeah, all kinds of recorded presentations and blog articles and, and things to help you get to know us better and, uh, understand the security automation space as a whole.

Better. Cool, man. Excellent.

Alright, let's jump into our topic of discussion today though. And, and we were gonna talk about, well, on, on my, on my teleprompter here, it's unraveling the siloed barrier, but really what we're talking about, you know, like the 1984 commercial, right? Breaking down the walls between infrastructure engineering and security teams.

And look, this is a, this is a long standing wall, a long standing border, no man's land like D M Z and, uh, in between North and South Korea, where like you, I'm from the security side of the house. And, you know, a lot of security people say those people just don't take security seriously. No one cares about security, but us and the infrastructure engineering people are just, you know, hey, these security people, they slow us down.

Everything is no with them, right? But, and, and probably the truth lays somewhere in between, right? Of Course.

But how do we, how do we, we've made some progress, but let me get your take on that. Sure. Um, so yeah, like you said, um, it's been, it's been a struggle for a long time.

Uh, kind of a, a battle, um, as somebody who's been on both sides of the house as a engineer, um, and also doing the security side, uh, I've, I've definitely seen both sides of the coin, and both sides are important for sure. Um, you know, you need velocity. You need, um, your infrastructure, operations and engineering efforts to not be restricted, uh, unnecessarily, but you also need to keep security best practices in mind when you're doing these things.

And I think that a lot of the progress that we've made as an industry, uh, in the past eight to 10 years, I guess as DevOps, uh, has kind of transformed into DevSecOps, is that more thought is being put into the initial infrastructure, construction and maintenance, and all of these really important holistic things that traditionally, uh, were kind of ignored in favor of, um, kind of the fire drill approach to security, which kind of, uh, was the main approach that we saw for most organizations a little earlier on in the history of, of the cybersecurity journey, right? So, uh, you know, security's not a bolt on. You can't just only pay attention to it when it's a problem.

You have to really take a holistic approach and, uh, integrate security into your initial, uh, infrastructure posture, uh, as well as, you know, your update plans and your organizational plans and everything. And I think that as an industry, we've definitely made strides, uh, in that arena. Uh, but we still have a ways to go for sure.

Uh, for sure we've made some strides, but yes, also for sure, we, we, we still have a way to go. So, you know what, let's first start with some of the strides. Let, let's, let's emphasize the positive rather than the negative.

Nick, in your, you know, since you, you're here 13, 15 years, uh, you know, in, in this space, looking at what would you think some of these big, some of the big gains have been? What have been the big wins? Um, I think a couple of the big wins have been one awareness.

Um, you know, just like with any issue, awareness is, is critical. Um, I think that everyone from executive teams to field agents to sales, to everyone understands now that security is incredibly important to an organization's basically operational capability. Um, if you're not taking security seriously, it will come back to bite you.

There are an almost infinite variety and number of bad actors out there. Um, everyone wants, you know, r d secrets or money or something, and if you're the low hanging fruit, you will be plucked. Um, and I think that the, the, the awareness of that across pretty much every organization has been a huge benefit to not just security organizations within those organizations, but also to everyone's security posture in general.

Um, if everyone's taking it more seriously, it's kind of that rising tide effect where, you know, uh, there's fewer low hanging fruit and the attackers have to work that much harder to achieve their goals. Mm-hmm. Um, I think also operationally there's been a lot of, uh, push to break down these silos, break down these walls, uh, between the various, uh, functions within an organization.

Uh, I think that people have really recognized the, the criticality of including security early on, you know, the security department early on in your designs, um, instead of just waiting, like I said earlier for that, that fire drill approach where you're just waiting for something to go wrong and then addressing it when it does. Uh, I agree with you. You know, look, I always look at things as people process technology.

I think one of the, quite frankly, the biggest problem we had was people, right? I I, as you know, I alluded to earlier, half jokingly, we didn't have a meeting of the minds between security and, and, and infrastructure engineering, or for that matter, DevOps and developers, everyone with security, right? And, and I think that is a front where we have made a ton of progress from the, as you say, from the executive C level board level on down, people are recognizing, yes, security is important.

These aren't, you know, Henny Penny and Boyle cried wolf kind of things. We've gotta take security seriously. And, and here's another thing that I've learned Nick, and, and that is no one raises their hand and says, I don't give a crap about security, or, I don't mind having Swiss cheese security and having, you know, bad things.

We all want good security, we all want quality. So I think from the people point of view, we, we've, we've made a heck of a lot of progress. Yeah.

There's still, you know, bumps along the way, but we've made progress from a technology point of view. I think we've made some decent progress too. We actually have security products now that are geared to non-security folks using them, right?

We see it in the DevSecOps, the shift left thing and all that. Mm-hmm. Um, again, not perfect, but we, we've made good product there.

Project, uh, progress there. The processes though, I think are still sort of a nomads land. Yeah, I would agree with you there.

I think that a lot of this stuff has yet to be really well codified in a lot of organizations. Yeah. Um, it's still a lot of kicking stuff over the wall.

What, what remains of the wall to, you know, the security team, like, Hey, can we do this? And they either say yes or no, and then you fight over it a little bit and Yeah. Yeah.

A there's, there's definitely a lot of benefit to having good processes around how the security team is expected to interact with every other facet of your organization. Having an ad hoc approach to that, um, there's gonna be gaps and things are gonna get left behind, or communication's going to break down. Um, and obviously neither of those is desirable.

Yeah, they're not. And, and I think, you know, fore warns for armed in these cases, right? You can't ad hoc approach doesn't do it.

So Nick, let's talk a little bit about how does Swimlane help here? Sure. So, uh, swim Lane has been around for I think about seven or eight years now, um, as an organization.

And we are currently the largest pure play security automation, uh, organization in the world. Um, the, there were some, some other competitors of ours that have since been bought up by other companies. Um, so we are the currently the largest basically SOAR company, uh, on the market.

Um, as such, we've had a, a pretty interesting variety of customers over the years that have exposed us to a lot of different needs inside and outside of security. Um, I think really the strength of Swimlane as a company and as a platform is that it's extremely customizable and that allows you to use, um, a lot of functions outside of traditional SOC use cases. Um, I think a limitation of a lot of SOAR products on the market is that the SS is where the s for security is where they start and stop.

Um, and they don't really, either they don't support use cases like, uh, HR type stuff or legal type stuff, um, or they, it's just not on their roadmap because it's not, you know, a, a revenue center or something like that, whatever business decision is made. Um, but really to me, the strength of Swim Lane is that you can build almost anything once you learn the processes and how to use the product. Um, as long as the products you're interacting with have an A P I, um, we can interact with it and we can perform any kind of orchestration automation.

And we also have a really robust case management system, um, really nice record designing, um, that gives you a really good front end experience as well. Um, that's extremely customizable, uh, as opposed to a lot of a lot of SOAR products. Um, so I think that's really where Swim Link can help.

Um, specifically Swim Link can help is not just increasing your security posture within the sock, but expanding outside of the sock to these kind of orbits around it. Um, and as you do break down those silos between security and DevOps and infrastructure and all these other organizations, the more information you can keep together, the better of a kind of system of record you have of everything that's happening from a security perspective in your organization. Um, so yeah, I think that's, I think that's really where we excel, um, in general, but also specifically related to this conversation.

I think that being able to expand outside of the traditional SOC use cases is absolutely huge and it's something we're gonna see a lot more, uh, from various automation platforms in the future. I, I agree with that a hundred percent. Um, Nick, we're about outta time.

I want to thank you for coming on here and, and telling us about this. And look, this is, I didn't realize that Swimlane is, is now the leading in, you know, soar, standalone SOAR out there. Yep.

Um, we're, um, at the time of this recording, we are also number one on Gartner peer reviews, so Good, good for you guys. Yeah, We have a lot of happy customers, um, which is a great thing, great place to be. Um, you know, we, we work hard and we, uh, we really try to help our customers succeed with their, with their use cases, uh, you know, whatever they're building.

Um, we have a great professional services team too, who does an amazing job just building things that you, you can barely dream of. Sometimes it's like physical security use cases that monitor whether your doors and gates are open and when your employees coming in and out, like, I've never seen a SOAR platform do that before. It's really cool.

Me Either. Very cool. Hey man, thanks for coming on.

Keep us posted and best of luck. Thanks. Have a great day.

All right. Nick Taek, lead security automation architect at Swim Lane, talking about, talking about busting down barriers between infrastructure, engineering, development, DevOps, and security. We're gonna take a break here on Tech Drunk tv.

We'll be right back.