Introducing Sysdig’s Newest CMO – Bryce Hein, Sysdig

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Textron TV.

I am happy to introduce you to he's a first-time guest here on Tech stock price hind Bryce is a recently announced CMO at systic. And and for those of you who watched Textra on TV, you know, we feature cystic pretty regularly there. They're good people that they have great product and we always enjoy hearing what's going on.

It's this thing so let's welcome Bryce to his first text on TV interview here. Hey Bryce, welcome. How are you?

Thank you. Alan happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

All right our pleasure. So don't want to embarrass you or anything but congratulations on the new role and and CMO there and Let's start with a little bit about Bryce if you don't mind you want to share with the audience? Yeah, happy to do that now.

I'll keep a short because I'd rather talk about tech than talk about myself. But so I'm been assisting now since the start of the Year prior to that. I was actually with the company in cyber called extra hot.

So more on the detection and response secops side of kind of the industry and then previous experience in big data analytics and data management storage those Industries, but quick fact Allen. I actually started my career as a systems administrator so really yeah. Yeah, and I've always tried to keep that sort of sensibility and empathy because while the market is completely changed right since the mid 90s certainly the pressure on it on deaf secops teams is higher than ever and that urgency to do more with less is just like right at the Forefront.

So anyway, well interesting. Yeah. No you want so from where I said price and I get to interview a lot of people and a lot of CMOS.

And and I get really bummed out when people in our audience say something like oh, it's a CMO. He's just here. She's just a marketing person.

You know what? I I'm gonna Venture a guess that 66% two thirds of CMOS actually started their business careers on the tech side of the house. They were engineers this admins security profolk or you know, some of them write code I've written code they have hundreds thousands of line of code and Commercial products and then they, you know at some point in their career they moved over to the business side.

Yeah, right and and become eventually the successful ones become CMOS and VP marketing and so forth. So You know, I'm not surprised. I'm I'm happy to hear it, but I'm not surprised, you know as an industry.

I mean you think about your viewers, right and what they're trying to solve within not only just sort of like the overall build cycle and and trying to innovate cloud and in the cloud but also secure it and that's a challenge. And so if you don't bring people who have technical background to be able to talk to people with really hard technical problems, I think you're missing out, you know on the speed at which cloud is moving and and which Cloud security is moving and evolving. You've got to have technical chops or you just you just won't survive.

I agree you I I tell people even my like our marketing and sales people here in Tech strong, right because we're dealing our audience is very technical and all of our sponsors are Tech vendors. You gotta be able to talk to talk and walk the walk. You're not gonna fake it with these people.

They smell it a while away, right? And and so it's important. I think you're 100% right?

so Bryce 90% of our audience is heard of cystic. 75% of them think they know what this thing does. 50% of them are probably right but for the other 50% how would you describe kind of systic mission to them?

And what's this thing does? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so cystic fundamentally as a cloud security companies and we got our start solving what we call it considered the hard part which is runtime and workload protection.

But over the last couple of years it really spread out to cover the entire gamut of cloud security, which is not an easy thing to do anything from configuration and vulnerability management to Identity and access controls through to detection and response so you can think of us as starting with runtime insights. That's how we sort of anchor our value inside our platform, but we apply it to both shift left and shield right just that's how we think about the business as you got to cover kind of that whole gamut Absolutely. I like that shift left Shield, right?

Yeah. So yeah, it's a good way of saying it. Yeah, what what we find Alan is that a lot of the runtime learnings that you have.

In fact, we just published 2023 basically security and usage report. So we do this every year this I think the sixth year we've done it and you'd be really surprised what you find out about what's in use and how that can be applied to prioritizing vulnerabilities and configurations and things you need to do Upstream. So that's where the whole sort of Shield or shift left Shield right kind of comes from is a mindset of thinking across that absolutely I think we covered the this year's report it we cover the report every year someone on our team.

You know, I can we have an article and some videos of people want to look up on Security Boulevard or or on texture on TV. So Bryce. It's an interesting time certainly in the tech world, right?

We've had a lot of companies doing layoffs. VC is you know VC funds are have slowed down a little bit though. Fact be told this so pretty healthy.

Yeah. But security has never been more important. Yeah, right Security's job one.

Sitting where you sit now is the CMO here at cystic. Where do you see the market? Where do you see where you guys have to kind of Make Your Mark and get your message out?

Yeah, I would say this you're you're right. The stakes have never been higher both to solve the things that we know and the vulnerabilities and to deal with the things that are addressable and to deal with the things that are unknown, you know, I think about your audience and and basically just an army of One going against all kinds of, you know, cyber syndicates and nation states and all all of that. So, Think as an industry haven't spent enough time particularly on the cloud side of the house is on detection and response for unknown threats.

So I actually think this is the year where that becomes more important, you know, if if we've done the things that we need to do on shift left and I'm not saying that solved right? There's still a lot to do. It's really trying to figure out how we capture unknown threats in time in a world where you know, a container life is average five minutes right in that, you know, we talk about ephemeral, but the people on your audience know like things are going up and down all the time and and if you've if you're not able to detect in real time, if you're not able to respond in real time, I think that just opens up the aperture for attacks.

yeah, I mean I I think So the the average lifespan of a container is you know is one measure. Yeah, but I think overall. We've gotten good at this devops stuff.

We've gotten good that continuous integration and continuous deployment. We've even gotten pretty good at shift Left Right shifting not just security left, but testing QA in general and everything else. We're releasing faster.

And more and more automated fashion than ever before. but that acceleration of these business Cycles I think is just more pressure on the on the Campbell's back. of You know, we got to keep keeping up right?

It's like, you know, I finally got up to speed where I'm running with you and now you hit the engine again, and I I got you know, and I don't know. I don't know how we keep doing. Right?

How much more can we squeeze out of this baby? Well, well, there's a couple of things that I see as as both good reminders of where we're at. But then also kind of hope for the future.

First of all, I think we have to acknowledge that in no part of the business. Is there more pressure on sort of like speed versus risk and how you manage that right? I will say on the shift left part.

The interesting thing we found is you if you look at what is in runtime if you think about the containers and runtime and so on 85% of those still have high or extreme vulnerabilities measure by CVSs. So like they're still work to be done to prioritize what we're doing shift left and I think if we can do that in a way that isn't a drag on dev that isn't an even more of a burden that's a prioritized way that sort of gets the mess out of the way. There's hope in that in other words taking insights for what's in runtime.

line them back to vulnerability management and the like I will say the other piece of Hope for me. You mentioned the maturity level of where we're getting to right real time to delivery uptime has never been higher. I actually think that when we talk about detection and response Alan that there's a There's a way to get the response actually automated in Cloud.

Well before we do it on Prem. If I give you an example one of my competitors over in another life talked a lot about TCP TCP resets as a way to sort of like respond, right? To it, right?

No, 20 years ago. I'm selling ideas IPS, you know Summit there was some of the IPS vendors that's what they would do when they'd see like suspect traffic. They do a TCP reset what a stupid it was stupid then it's stupid or now probably but right I'm surprised to hear it.

No, no still people kind of a spouse in the value that but I do think to your point about where we're getting on maturity There's an opportunity do automated response in the cloud and to sort of build that into how we think and to me that's hope to me that's hope of how you can first of all you got to address it. You've got to know what those threats are but second of all how do you build infrastructure to be able to react and I think there's hope in the club. You know.

Look one of the things about the cloud was it gave us a chance to? Maybe correct some past sense right have a fresh start. If you will, of course look you were around the same way.

I was when Cloud first came out, you know, one of the big knocks was well, it's inherently insecure right Cloud. How do you secure the cloud? I think I think overall our Industries done an amazing job of answering that right if Cloud security Cloud security is not on Prem or you know molten Castle security.

I think initially people said what they said because they were thinking in terms of taking what we had used. You know on-prem if I could use that word and just shifting it up to the cloud. Yeah.

Cloud washing it that that didn't work but we've now seen companies like this steak. That would build purpose-built. Yeah for the cloud security mission right that Warren built.

To be sitting as a big honking box next to the router or something, you know, inspecting traffic like that and it's made a huge difference, I think. I don't know if anyone would raise their hand and say the cloud is less secure. than an on-prem data center these days.

Yeah, no and and you know, so as I feel a sense of urgency on, you know, helping people solve the vulnerabilities on doing detection and response and in automated fashion, but I guess I would add one thing you you said maybe think there's another hope which is to do it in an open and Community Based. I'd like Star Wars. There's more hope you know, we gotta have another you know, there's but yeah, what's what's the New Hope for the last I think the other hope is you know, as we tackle supply chain challenges and so on which they're just native to what we do we have to do that as a community and I you know, we believe fundamentally in open source and building on open source and contributing to open source.

Frankly. It's a reason that I'm here is because I also believe in that mission that ethos. Yeah, and the company was founded on it.

I don't know how many of your viewers actually know but we are we're actually the creators of Falco, which is really the The default standard for detection response or detection in the cloud and over 50 million downloads. Like wow people are using it. Our product is built on it.

It's centered around, you know, Falco is open source. Yeah. I don't know how many of our audience knows that yeah.

It's not something that we've gotten a lot of light on. This is something maybe someone could write an article on that. We could put on Security Boulevard or something.

It's true. I mean and look. you're not the only one so much of our infrastructure today is built around open source, right Cloud native is almost all open source, and so You know, I think when I look over the landscape.

Probably one of the biggest things over the last let's say 10 years has been the domination of Open Source. It's not just sneaking in the back door. It's not.

It comes right in through the front door and it's welcomed. Right? It's it's the it's become the standard.

That's right standard and it's and it's pushed us on Innovation side. I mean whether it's used and it's like Falco or I'll give you another one that that we didn't contribute but we use heavily is a technology called eBPF and certainly it's getting a lot of hype right now, but effectively what it allows you to do is instrumentation up at the code level up at the up at the up at the host level. So and by the way, that's a whole religious War for cloud security vendors is do you go agent do you go agent less?

And yeah, it's always been a religious War. You know, that's a lot of Charlotte kids who say their agent list, but they're they sneak an agent in under another name. But yeah, I thought those words.

Well if I could just add a comment on that I think eBPF is an open source technology that will certainly help and if you're if you're asking me I think this year Is the year where that gets settled in the industry where instrumentation is going to have to have both it's going to be agent list where you know, it's very simple to get to API and logs and need when runtime and areas like that where you're going to need to use agents or column collectors if we all want to get more comfortable with it, but it's gonna for cloud security which is a hard like Full Throttle kind of challenge. It's going to require a spectrum of use of agent list and agents. Don't disagree with you for a second, my friend.

Right. So about out of time. I told you the 15 minutes goes really quick.

We're actually over but it's been a pleasure having you on I want to wish you the best of luck over it's this thing and to all our friends. It's this big don't be a stranger. You haven't opened invitation.

Come on whenever you'd like. You got something to share. Let's share it.

Okay, all the best time. Thank you bright side. Newly installed.

Newly minted CMO over at cystic here on Tech strong TV. We'll be back in just a moment.