Connie Stack, Next DLP | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey everybody, welcome back. I am Sharon Florentine managing editor here at techstrong group, home of Security Boulevard.

We are streaming to you live from rsac 2023 here in Moscone West. I am joined by Connie stack. Who is the CEO of next DLP welcome.

It is great to be here with you Connie. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate you that you bet. So um, you have been at next since August of 2022. How's that been going?

What have you been working on? It's really been it's been great first and foremost, you know to make the move from you know, marketing I grew up in marketing was the CMO most of my career in Tech and making that shift to CEO was an important a big one for me. So I want to make sure it was the right company and it certainly is we have an incredible team incredible technology and really doing, you know, a lot of interesting things to disrupt what we you know, the Legacy data loss.

Mentioned space so it's been going fantastic Built My leadership team bought in some people that were familiar, you know to me from my days at digital guardian and Beyond in the past. So we really started our go-to-market in Earnest in January. So okay, very very excited about that built the foundation in the fall go to market is effectively, you know up and running and you know, we're doing some cool things signing up some new great customers.

So we're excited about the prospects and what we're doing really is is focusing on building a Next Generation approach to data protection in general. Okay, and we're doing that by combining Insider risk as well as some of the traditional capabilities of data loss prevention. Okay.

So you mentioned disrupting DLP. Can you talk a little bit about the Legacy DLP space and the challenges there and how you are coming at those and disrupting them know and it is interesting right and I can speak really from experience. I spent eight years at what was then vertices?

I rebranded that as CMO into digital Guardian. Okay, they were acquired by help systems now rebranded the fortra. So I'm very very familiar with the Legacy space and it is the challenge with Legacy is it is what it is.

It's older technology that was built for a different time candidly. Now, I would never imply that Legacy vendors have stood still because I haven't right but they're building new capability on Legacy or older technology or literally an older code base. So it's very easy to get stuck in break fix mode and not be innovating right?

That's the difference and that's why I was excited when I joined next because it's a brand new piece of technology two years old built on the most contemporary software out there Cloud only elasticsearch Kafka like all that cool stuff that's out there really built for a modern distributed Enterprise versus again Legacy technology. That was built when we worked very differently, right? We went to offices we had the Will protections of the network, I mean, I hate to say it and I know Sharon you've been in this business for a while too.

But the Technologies were built frankly under the kind of the The idea that the end user was the enemy the idiot, right the dummy, right and well no longer are they right? I mean security is in The Tech Guys Securities and mainstream media where all using password Lockers in our personal lives as well as our professional lives. So we have an end user.

I think that's really smart and next Bills upon that we take that end user and we want to help you build your cyber security army based on your team on the ground. They're your front lines. So we want to equip them for Success when it comes to protecting your data.

We do that using prompts real-time training at the point of risk when somebody might be doing something they shouldn't be right. Yeah those it's I was saying to someone earlier that you're taking what a lot of people consider to be the weakest link. Yeah and really turning them into that first line of defense.

Yeah, and and it is cool. I think it's really cool to see that Trend. I mean you hear human Centric a fair bit now and I think that is an important Trend because as our you know end users are getting smarter they understand They you know, they're less susceptible to you know, ransomware attacks and fishing and you know, all that sort of stuff.

They're just smarter not saying it's impenetrable, right? Certainly. It's nice to see technology say, hey, we're gonna enlist the user to be a part of the solution and not consider them a piece of the problem.

Right? Right. Yeah, so you have not very traditional background for someone who's reached where you are in cybersecurity.

Can you talk a little bit about that and your journey to where you are now? Absolutely. Yeah definitely have an entraditional kind of background when it comes to Tech.

I didn't grow up coding or anything like that. But the pivotal moment for me in my career was I was in retail shopping center marketing as a matter of fact and we call launched a credit card a Visa credit card with people International Bank at the time and it was the first time I ever got my hands on data. Okay, and I was like, holy cow.

Like I was judged on, you know, how pretty a billboard was and now all of a sudden I had I knew what my customers Doing I knew how they were, you know traversing the mall. I knew what they were purchasing. I was just completely enamored with it.

And from there. I made the leap to go work for the company that built the database that role our credit card program. So love text stayed in it was on a sales and marketing side for most of my career but have always been an executive leadership.

You know, I've been I've often been the lone woman and a table, you know surrounded by by men but really I was welcomed into technology. I was welcomed into cybersecurity and like I said, really really enjoyed it. So did the sales and marketing side always an executive management and then made the leap into the to the CEO, okay.

How does that how does that change your approach to hiring especially in cybersecurity where we talk a lot about the skills Gap and you know the the lack of people coming in to fill all of these roles that need to be filled you actively seek out folks with you know background similar to yours or we we do our very best to do that. You know, the the reality is in many cases. There's not enough of there's not diverse enough pool to pull from right.

So I really believe that to make a change we've got to go into the Grassroots. So we sponsor programs. We did a digital Guardian with the United Way I do here at next today.

We work with a couple of companies in the London area spark is one of those where we want to get stem in front of you know kids when they're young girls, you know people have call or it's like anybody we want to be diverse, but we've got to build that diverse pool my company definitely tries to appeal to you know diver. Candidates but the reality is only so many out there. So I want to go build that pool even more strongly.

So we have more to pull from in the future. So we're working with kids. We're working with teens.

We're exposing them to cybersecurity helping them understand what a great career path it is and by the way, it is millions. Yeah on field roles, you know around the world. So yeah, so that's why we really go Grassroots with this because we want to grow that base and that that funnel of talent, you know for us in the future fantastic.

I know we're kind of early here on the first day of RSA, but what are you excited about? What are you looking forward to seeing? What are your impressions of the show so far?

Yeah. Well it definitely early but this is been I think when we miss covid but 16th year I think for me at our oh, wow. I've seen a lot of change obviously at the show.

I am excited just to be interacting with people. Yeah, we move to, you know remote and I work remotely I'm a person who gets a lot of energy from people. So it's just great to be interacting with People so I'm looking forward honestly to spending some time, you know in in the booth and getting to interact with security practitioners and just have conversations about you know, what they care about.

Yeah, I think I don't think there's anybody here that's not curious about Ai and how people are you know leveraging AI right at GPT plugins in particular. Yeah large language models, like all that stuff, you know that we hear about again generally is gonna impact, you know cybersecurity technology. So we're keenly aware that and we just made an announcement as a company that you know, we introduce some product policies, you know within the next reveal platform to enable folks to use AI to be able to understand if folks are using chat GPT within your environment, you know, are they pasting sensitive data in like week right and help you control it?

So that's kind of our first step but we definitely are exploring and want to do more when it comes to learn large language models just to help because insecurity you have to do more with less right too many, you know, there's not enough bod. To do the work, right so we can you know automate use AI to make it smarter to make your job faster. That's kind of what we're aiming to do.

So, I'm really really Keen to visit other booths and other you know, other vendors and other players to see how they are going about leveraging. Like I said more AI more large language models awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming here and hanging out with us this morning.

We really appreciate it and folks stay tuned. We got plenty more conversations here. We are here all week Monday through Thursday at rsac 2023.

I'm Sharon Florentine. See you soon.