Security: The innovation enabler. Building better teams and relationships with Wes Mullins, CTO of Deepwatch

This episode features an interview with Wes Mullins, Chief Technology Officer at Deepwatch, Deepwatch's innovative cloud platform and borderless SOC extends their customers’ cybersecurity teams and proactively protects their brand, reputation and digital assets. Wes has nearly 20 years of industry experience, having started his career as a developer, then working in networking and finally cybersecurity. Prior to Deepwatch, Wes was the VP of Global Cyber at Nielsen. On this episode, host Tim Chase and Wes discuss the factors he considers when selecting potential partners - and how they got a partnership with AWS - why you shouldn’t try to sell anything during the first customer engagement, and the one most important quality in a new hire.

Key Quotes

*”You can teach aptitude, but you can't teach attitude. So how do you find the right people that maybe don't have the experience that's on the job description, that maybe don't meet the requirements that the recruiters want or the hiring manager want, but know that they can still do the job and afford them the opportunity to do that and put people in tough positions to fail? Because if they're never put in those spots, they're never really gonna break the mold and succeed.”

*”Culture and people. We can talk about technology, AI and automation. I think any good leader, whether it's cyber or any other role, needs to have a good handle on culture in the people. They need to have a great relationship with the people team itself. The HR team or the people team, they're your advocates. They're there to help you protect you, and ensure that you're doing the right thing.”

*”If you don't have good relationships with the other parts of the business that you have to work with, it's gonna be a struggle. You need to get their buy-in. And having a great relationship across line of service, across BAU, BU, Opco, Subco, whatever they call it, things just become things on spreadsheets and swapping head count, and swapping budget and moving priorities up and back, become random phone calls on a Friday. And that's the type of relationships you want to have.”

*”Security shouldn't just be considered a call center. It's considered a business enabler. There are situations that will continue to happen where security is going to be your enabler to go as fast as you can go. Because they're gonna let you know the minimum level of acceptable risk to go ship those features and make those changes that you need.”

*”Any good first customer engagement is a fact finding session. Like not selling anything, not pitching anything, not comparing anything, most certainly not talking about competition. But really trying to find out what that individual wants, what they need, what they're trying to get, and what is their problem.” 

Time Stamps

[03:30] Introducing Wes Mullins, CTO at Deepwatch

[1:18] How did Wes go from developing into security?

[5:08] From CISO to CTO

[6:28] How does Wes’ security knowledge serve him as a CTO?

[8:51] What are the critical qualities a security leader should have?

[13:20] How do you tailor your leadership approach to each customer?

[16:34] How do partnerships drive the business forward?

[18:26] What factors does Wes consider when selecting potential partners?

[20:43] How does Deepwatch coordinate communications to deliver MDR?

[27:40] What’s the one tool Wes can’t live without?

[28:18] What’s the most exciting security trend currently?

Links

Connect with Wes on LinkedIn

Learn more about Deepwatch

Learn more about Lacework

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