THE CEO INTERVIEW www.ceotodaymagazine.com 20 assisted in making the transition smooth and pretty seamless. Have you faced any challenges so far and if so, how have you resolved them? Yes, a few challenges have risen up. I had an opportunity earlier this year to hear Michael Dell at SXSW and one of the questions he was asked was what he would tell his younger self. Michael replied: “to be more patient”. In startups, we are moving as fast as humanly possible while wearing the preverbal “many hats”. A small challenge does not really impact that momentum but a larger challenge can completely derail the progression. Thus, Michael’s words remind me to listen, absorb, trust the system and then make wellthought-out decisions. To maintain the momentum does not mean delay but act swiftly with conviction and then move on. What’s your vision for the future of Waratek? In the short term, I want Waratek to pioneer and be the market leader in Security-as-Code. The adoption of DevOps is helping engineering, and while 83% of organisations say that DevOps is or will be used to help speed up deployment, it actually makes security’s job more difficult. There is a focus on “shifting left,” but the answer isn’t moving security earlier in the same process that causes burnout, especially with 85% of organisations reporting a workforce shortage affecting app and system security. Rather than trying to force Security to integrate fully with the DevOps process, Security-as-Code empowers Security teams with the autonomy to work separately in parallel to Development. Through automation, it provides protection in the runtime with zero false positives to address known and unknown vulnerabilities in realtime, with near-zero impact. The long-term problem we are trying to solve is that currently, the DevOps process of correcting vulnerable or flawed code is reactionary, hence the increase in zero-days over the past several years. As a result, you typically have to wait for something bad to happen before you realise there’s a need to act. In the future, Waratek will analyse the applications’ DNA to spot complex vulnerabilities and layer customer data on top of our patented security engine, that understands at an atomic level the makeup of a vulnerability, to make more intelligent recommendations and autonomously apply just in time Security-as-Code mitigations and remediations. What’s your favourite thing about your new role as the CEO? My favourite part of being CEO is witnessing the monumental shift in the passion and vibe of our employees as they actively participate in building on the vision of being the pioneering and dominant leader in Security-asCode. What do you hope your legacy will be? I hope that I can inspire people to do extraordinary, creative and innovative things while delivering on our mission to improve the lives of security teams through automation and DevSecOps principles. “ To maintain the momentum does not mean delay but act swiftly with conviction and then move on. “
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