Lacework: Leading the Way From Product to Platforms

This has been a busy, and quite humbling week for me as I have accepted the position as CEO of Lacework. I already feel fortunate to work with this extraordinarily talented and energetic team, but now I’ll have the opportunity to help them execute a strategy to establish Lacework as the most innovative, customer-focused security company on the planet.

I originally joined Lacework almost 18 months ago. While I’ve been in security for most of my career, I had never seen a solution that was as comprehensive as Lacework, nor one that addressed security so effectively. Effective security is borne out of insight and perspective, but also of a recognition that it’s a far too valuable thing to make it complicated. Lacework has, from the beginning, sought to give users the insight and context they need to secure their applications, accounts, and workloads, but in a way that maps to how they work. We’ve kept an incredibly complex problem relatively simple in practice, and it’s among the reasons we’ve grown with great customers from a variety of businesses.

But 18 months seems like a lifetime in this market, and we’ve seen all kinds of changes happen – new vendors with point solutions, lots of new funding, some acquisitions, pivoting by some vendors, and a variety of other changes. But while others scramble to adapt a product to a perceived market need, Lacework has elegantly adapted our core solution into a platform that not only covers the entirety of a users’ environment, but that has evolved along with the shifts in market trends.

I believe every major security shift happens as a result of three main elements:

• A major shift in IT architectures
• A large and addressable attack surface that map to users’ environments
• The changing methods and means by which attackers can exploit infrastructures

The market we’re in now is adapting to usage trends around IaaS and PaaS, and is making effective use of containers and Kubernetes to create highly agile and continuously changing environments. While some of these trends ease the burden on development and operations teams, they also create a more complex structure that, if not managed effectively with security, can have a far bigger attack surface.

And while we’re still in the early days of this transition, it’s clear that Lacework is delivering the right security approach. Applying a security platform to this problem, rather than trying to integrate a disjoined stack of tools, is the only effective way for organizations to identify threats and identify vulnerabilities. Platforms will win in this market, and Lacework is working to deliver the best platform to secure cloud, container, hybrid, and all other types of environments.

I can’t be more excited to help lead this amazing team of innovators and business builders, and to use my experiences and the combined teamwork of the Lacework operation to take Lacework to the next phase of growth.

Lastly to all the employees of Lacework and to all of our customers, I thank you all for your support, advice, and teamwork — I’m so excited to get moving on this journey with all of you!