Q&A w/ Nasdaq, Forescout & Rapid7

Twitter: @spokedylan

Dylan James: I’m here with Mr. Jeff Bray, the Vice President of Investor Relations at Rapid7 and Julie Cullivan, Chief Information Officer at Forescout. Julie, kick us off with a little bit of a discussion on the Rapid7 and Forescout partnership.

Julie Cullivan: We’re very excited about our partnership with Rapid7. Forescout believes the ability to share intelligence and orchestrate across security tools allows our customers to leverage their investments but also to reduce risk. Our partnership with Rapid7 marries their rich vulnerability assessment ratings intelligence with our comprehensive device visibility intelligence and control capabilities to automatically take actions on vulnerable devices as soon as they connect to your network.

Jeff Bray: We’re very excited to work with Forescout. Rapid7 is about combining visibility, that’s the core of what we do. When you integrate Rapid7’s InsightVM with Forescout, what you find is you have even broader visibility. What everyone’s trying to do is reduce their risk, manage their risk. When Forescout tells us that something’s coming on the network, we can assess it, we can prevent customers from unnecessarily adding risk into their IT environment.

Dylan: Julie, the role of the CIO, so very close to your world. Is that evolving to include more than just traditional IT in your opinion?

Julie: Very much so. In fact, in my first CIO role, I had never worked in IT before I stepped into the CIO role. I come from the business side so I really think the ability to understand what the business is trying to achieve is critical for a CIO to be successful and then figure out how to enable those capabilities through technology. I think the other thing that’s evolved is how important the CIO’s role is in risk management for the organization as well. It’s an exciting moment and it changes all the time.

Jeff: One of the things I always say about technology is technology is an amplifier, it doesn’t necessarily solve problems but it takes your processes and amplifies how good they are and, sometimes, how bad they are as well. The best CIOs understand the business, as you said. They understand when you bring in technology, your processes better be good. Because if they’re not, everything is going to work even worse than it did before. The best CIOs understand that, and they are making sure that the technology’s integrating in good process, good technology, and achieving better outcomes in the end.

Dylan: What’s your take on the need for cybersecurity experts on the board?

Jeff: We’re clearly getting more questions from investors about what our risks are, governance risks, and we have a lot of investors who consider cybersecurity to be a governance issue. So, it’s incredibly important for boards to be aware of that. The reality is that most senior management teams, CEOs, even board members, don’t have the language and the understanding of how to talk about cybersecurity and cybersecurity risks. We do think it’s important but we think we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg there. We need to be able to educate more board-level and executives about how do you understand where you are in your cybersecurity maturity.

Julie: I recently joined a public company board and part of what made me attractive to them, in terms of the mix and what skills they were looking to fill out on the board, was the fact that I had a cybersecurity background. I think boards are taking it seriously and they’re trying to fill those gaps.

Dylan: What would you say is the biggest change in cybersecurity attacks over the past few years?

Julie: In many ways they’re very similar attacks but I think what’s most interesting right now is how the focus is a little bit less about financial gain and a lot more about business disruption and really causing pain for organizations. I think sometimes it’s the same techniques, but the motives are different.

Jeff: I think one thing that’s evolved quite a bit in the last few years is that there’s an economic system underlying the attackers. They have access to so many more tools and the tools are multiplying because of the amount of money that they can make throughout the attack chain. The number of people that are coming at you is growing even now.

Dylan: Well with that, we’ll wrap up. Thank you both so much for your time.