Lynne Doherty, Sumo Logic | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hi everyone. We're back here.

We're back here at RSA. So happy you're joining us in our continuing coverage from the show floor here. Oh not from the show floor.

We're not on the show floor though. They couldn't tell because oh they see is this background. We are at Moscone West and what we call broadcast alley and we're pleased to have you here.

Let me introduce you to Lynne Doherty. Did I get it? Right got it, right.

You got it, right goodness. Lynn is with sumo logic and look if you watch Tech strung TV, you know last week we were a dancer Dam in kubecon and we had a chance to catch up with the Sumo logic Cloud native team over there had a great conversation, but now we're here really cyber Focus because it's RSA and RSA is we're cyber comes together. Lynn welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. So my pleasure to have you here Lynn before we jump into RSA and cyber and even Sumo.

Let's talk a little bit about Lynn. If you don't mind share with our audience, it's kind of your story. Yeah, well at sumologic, I am the President of our go to market team.

So for us that includes our sales team our Professional Services Customer Support esses operations of the company. I've been here about 18 months which has absolutely flown by but in our world also, that's a very long time a long time. It's a lifetime in an engine to an Android.

But yeah, that's right a long time in a short time at this time and a lot change we're doing a lot in the last 18 months. Absolutely. It's been it's been a been an interesting 18 months, right?

Covid hopefully end of covid. Yeah economic craziness World craziness. Security craziness.

Yeah, this is always something going on before Sumo give us an idea of your posts. I was with McAfee then split into trellis. Really.

I I was with McAfee prior to that. I spent 15 years prior to that at Cisco really in all different roles at Cisco and before that. I actually started my career as a developer.

So I started as an engineer in my career and and have made the jump and now moved over to take care of customers and you know what we go to market. So I've been around forever. I It's not an uncommon path.

I know a lot of people who you know started his coders Engineers coding. They got thousands of line of lines of code in product, but moved over to sort of the business side of things whether it's in marketing or sales or customers supports or you know, but to the business side. Yeah, and it I think that's a pretty common path.

Unfortunately and this goes to you out in the audience people here that you're not in engineer or you're not on that technical side of things. They assume You're not a technologist can't make the jump. Yeah, right.

Yeah, it actually I think gives me a lot of empathy for what our customers object because I've been on the other side firsthand dealing with whether you're developing an application securing an application. I've got a lot of empathy in knowing how hard some of those things are which then I can look at. What do we have that helps them solve for that?

So yeah, but you're right A lot of people think that on both sides you can't make the jump one way or the other that you don't have the sort of cross cross skill set. I I agree 100% Um, so we got the link story. Let's look Sumo logic needs no introduction to our audience.

But just in case there might be a few people out. You don't understand Sumo is or they're not sure. How would you describe it to them lid?

Yeah. We are a company that's focused around two areas application observability and security with the foundation of it's got to be built on logs because ultimately Knowing something happened whether it's a security breach, whether it's an application issue. You need to be able to fix it and fixing it is is the ultimate goal of anybody who's running an application a consumer-based application or application for the business or a security practitioner.

And so we're application security. We're observability. But built on this Foundation of log analytics is what you actually need to get to the root of problem solving.

Absolutely and that was one of the best descriptions of sumo I've ever heard. Well only 18 months you did great everything told you of all right. So we're here at RSA along with 40 something thousand other people.

It's big again. It's it's back. Yeah, and I love I for one love it, right.

I've been coming here a very long time now and it's good to see my friends. It's good to see the people, but it's also good to see industry like this, you know we We forget I think one of the things we lost over this whole covid thing was how much we really love that human to human interaction seeing people you can see them on Zoom, but it's really it's not the same it is not the same. No, yeah.

but I'm wondering you know, I know Sumo has a big presence on the show floor. What are you hearing from your people there? Yeah, it's a lot of the same themes that I've seen over the years but I think it's it's that much more Amplified as people are going into this post-covid world where there's continues to be a lack of talent.

So I think that's something that I hear from our customers lack of talent and lack of skills to actually, you know, threats are getting harder to stop Technologies getting harder things like chat GPT coming out and the ability to do deep fakes and the ability to do better fishing at like all of those things are just getting harder and harder to solve for finding people and skills to do it is continues to be you know, a challenge that people have and then I think again the urgency around, how do you how do you actually fix and resolve problems faster is is that an all-time high? I think all of the things that you open with when you talked about it's it's, you know, geopolitical conditions. It's the economy.

It's post-covid. driven urgency in everything that we're doing now because we're sort of coming back and everything opening up at once and so the urgency around And sensitivity around keeping applications up keeping application secure is is higher than ever and a harder job than ever. I I agree with you 100% so the skills Gap the people Gap whatever you want to call it, you know a lot of people saying well we have to automate our way out of that.

Can we yeah, what do you think? Yeah. I don't think the answers ever and all or nothing.

I mean I think but there is absolutely automation that we can bring to it. If I'll just give an example of some of the things that we're doing. So we're putting insights into our Sim products.

So that one of the biggest problems that security practitioners face today is around false positives is around the ability to tune so that You know, I think every breach that we've heard about or not, maybe everyone but lots of them is oh they're actually were alerts on it. There were just so many alerts that we didn't know and and you've probably heard that hundreds of times and seen it and so how do we fix that problem? Because that's a problem that we can automate and so for us is bringing things like Yuba into our Sim products.

So you could look at what is normal behavior and abnormal behave here. It's doing Insight training of our Sim products. So it can use machine learning to notice Trends and to give again insights so that we can tune things better and and even something like for us bringing our Sim and sore products store products into our Sim products, so that it's not just no there's a problem.

It's how do you do the orchestration to resolve a problem? So I do think there's a part of it that you can automate your way out of but there's still absolutely a problem of how do we continue to educate? Bring people into the workforce.

How do we how do we do that in a world? Where now so many people are hybrid and how do we make that effective? And so I think it's got to be solved on both fronts agreed.

Excellent. You guys announced some news at the show too, right? Yeah, well a lot of yeah, a lot of product features.

Yeah, you're about it a lot of product features. So as I talked about bringing Yuba into SIM, so that's a really important one. How can a user how can a practitioner be able to look and say hey that doesn't look like what my users should be doing and so we've brought that into our Sim product but based on log analytics so that you really have a different approach to it than than a lot of other people take on that bringing those sore features that one of the things that I think is interesting you walk across the floor and there's hundreds of vendors here.

Right? And I think that's something that we're part of we live in that too, but there's hundreds of vendors and I think our customers are looking for how do they bring some of that together so that it's less Point Solutions and more looking at platforms. How do you get more insights because of it and so for us taking our Sim product and putting store functionality in it?

One less thing that a customer needs to deploy and to manage you also get better insights when you do that because the products are then, you know integrated together instead of two siled products. You know what I interviewed someone I think it was yesterday the days of signing around together. I apologize, but they said that the average organization has an excess of 25.

Yeah. Security products they managed. Yeah.

with a lot of overlap and you know, look, I know this is somewhat of a pendulum thing. Where we you know, it goes from best to breed to one throat to choke soda thing. Yeah.

But it's it's probably when we talk about the issue of you know, people's skills and technical skills finding people to who are experts on 25 different products is impossible. It's just think about the complexity. What else we have ended to that point though that puts a lot of risks to the organization because often times it's a single person who knows something and and again in the world of talent and talent movies and with the recipe dies or leaves.

Yeah, you're analog Grandma's recipe. It's not on those cookies will never those cookies again, but nobody or kidding inside it. It's that's an issue, you know, if we want to try to simplify and solve that skills Gap We can expect people to have that sort of breath.

I mean, that's just it's it's unrealistic. It's unrealistic. Yeah.

Yeah, so putting more into one product putting more capabilities so that that it comes together so that you get better sharing of data between two products that you have one person who or two people are having many people who know a product instead of sideload. I think a lot of times again when you think about what happens when there is a security breach, it's oftentimes at the seams of products. It's oftentimes, you know one product caught it in one way and one caught it in the other but you didn't have enough intelligence to cross them to really identify something and so so bringing things together so that they're less seams I think is is it Trend but it's where we're headed and and we've just announced in in our Sim product adding store capabilities for our customers.

And then lastly it's around bringing Insight. So so having insights integration. With something like chat GPT as an example.

So that that customers can learn from what other people are seeing. And I think that's I think it a lot security is in a lot of ways a team sport that we all need to learn and share with each other and so Innovations like machine learning within our products, but also Integrations with something like chat GPT enables it to be a team sport. So it's sort of all of us trying to protect our assets and our data against the people who are trying to break in and we got to share and learn from each other.

Absolutely. So you brought up the GPT word? Yeah.

You haven't announced any integration with it yet or you creation. Yeah, you haven't yeah, so open integration. I'm glad you brought it up that okay.

I didn't want to go there but you did. Okay, let's do it because I've been hearing a lot every vendor comes in says, oh, you know we see we either did in a great we're planning the integrate. We we want to integrate.

I want you to look because this camera is on you. Okay, what is it mean to the guy while a guy watching on here this GPT integration for Sumo? Yeah user.

I think the integration is about sharing data among people and again security is a team sport. It's it's how do we protect the data and assets that we all are trying to do for our companies and organizations? Against the people trying to break in with chat GPT Integrations.

It will allow us to learn. Smarter from each other and bring that into everybody's environment and I think that's how do we get stronger sort of a collective Community without obviously sharing things that are private and confidential within a company but chat GPT will allow that learning and sharing in a different way than exists today. Cool, so I love team sport.

That's what I think. That's how I would describe that is what how I would describe what Chachi PT does for us. Very cool.

Any other news or announcements? Those are a big ones those they know there are you yeah, those are our big ones look if people are watching this live. They've not probably here at the show and say why they're watching but if they want to go online of find out maybe more about these announcements just go to Sumo logic doctor.

com. Yeah, we've got all the announcements on there. We've got lots of assets, you know, whether it's online videos demos trials.

You got a lot of ways to even check it out and see case studies. I think case studies are actually one of the the best things to go check out because you can hear how somebody actually puts out of practice we can all talk. Theoretically.

Yeah. We always want to hear what their peers are doing. They're not the only ones who've had that problem and here are people who've had that problem and have a solution.

Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us here RSA. It's been great.

Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Flint out Doherty Sumo logic here at RSA we're gonna take a break.

We'll be right back.