It’s not often you get to make big changes in your career, but I’ve been lucky enough to do so recently with a move to London and a shift in the role from being a CISO to the business side, helping CISOs and CIOs be successful. I am thrilled to announce I am joining JupiterOne as General Manager, EMEA. I wanted to take a few minutes to highlight the thinking behind this decision.
Leadership
When you join an organization, you must align well with its leaders and leadership team. I’ve worked with Erkang Zheng in various capacities for almost a decade, and he ticks the boxes of a smart, driven, and humble leader with a big vision. When we first met, he was innovating on amazing application security risk products. Then, when he moved to a CISO role, he worked relentlessly on a unique product and automation framework to ensure security was comprehensively delivered for his organization. I want to work for someone I trust and who is building a strong culture of leading by example. I couldn’t be happier about that deciding factor. In meeting with the board members of JupiterOne, I can also say they are serious about executing the vision that Erkang has for the product and company.
Dream Team & Culture
Another huge factor for me is the team and culture your leader is creating. I have been fortunate enough to be part of some incredible “dream teams” in security and technology during my time at Bank of America, Barclays, Betfair, iSIGHT Partners, Reddit and Slack (and believe I have built some of my own), so I know what to look for. Seeing the talent that JupiterOne has attracted and meeting them to see how invested they are in making this product vision a reality while also being a great place to work was very important to me. As I will be operating at a significant distance from the rest of the organization, it is vital that we are all culturally aligned. I’ve had “humble experts” at the top of my cultural values for a long time and I see the hallmarks of this JupiterOne’s culture.
Product Vision
JupiterOne’s vision as a product is so compelling to me as I have been a CISO faced with the mountain of data of instances, identities, vulnerabilities, datastores, and regions and being asked by my board, executives, peers and team - “What’s most important?” “What do we even own?” “If there is a problem, who can fix it?” Many of us have been exasperated at the repeatedly failing asset management, vulnerability management, or identity program. By bringing an innovative approach using graph analysis to your security information, JupiterOne aims to simplify the complexity of security. It provides a management layer to your organization’s tools and systems to answer these key questions – not just at a point in time but repeatedly, and alerting you when things change. Knowing not just the list of things to fix but their relationships to the value of the business is a complete change to how we have been thinking about security.
My contribution
If you’d like to hear more, feel free to reach out here on LinkedIn or email/Slack me at sean.catlett@jupiterone.com.
