It’s not every day that one gets to chat with security luminaries such as Emily Heath. Most recently, Emily served as Chief Trust and Security Officer at DocuSign before becoming a Wiz board member. Her vast experience leading Fortune 100 companies through technology transformation and cultural change has granted her a reputation as someone who empowers creative and diverse teams to drive things forward and get things done. Today, we invite you to learn more about Emily as we welcome her to the Wiz team as our newest board member.
Assaf: How did you get to know Wiz and what caught your attention?
Emily: You and I first started talking about Wiz at the start of 2020. COVID was becoming a big topic and changing the way we work. As the CTSO of DocuSign at the time, the lack of security visibility was front of mind for me and I saw this as a huge problem for businesses. When meeting with other security leaders, I think it’s fundamental to ask: how much of your ecosystem are you proactively monitoring? This is a loaded question on purpose, because it assumes that you know where all of your assets are, that you understand your cloud environment, that you’re logging everything you need to log, etc. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for many. Particularly at the time, a few years ago when everybody was moving to the cloud, the cloud area was just a huge blindspot for businesses. They thought that cloud providers were providing all the security they needed, but that’s simply not the case. Visibility is the key word here for understanding just how big this problem was.
Against this backdrop, I saw that Wiz had similar concerns; it understands people like me and helps us to solve security problems for businesses. What’s more: it translates that understanding into actual practical solutions to help businesses take the security reins of their own ecosystems. Wiz grasped that concept of visibility and broke it down into manageable, practical solutions for security professionals to implement. That’s special.
Assaf: Why did you decide to join the board?
Emily: Because I am impressed with what Wiz is doing. It’s time to value, the fact that you can switch it on and the product speaks for itself, with no integration needed, is fantastic. Being able to see things you weren’t aware of in a matter of minutes is an outstanding feat in the security world.
But beyond the competency of the company, I also like to look at who is behind it. Ultimately, you want to spend your rare time with people you like, and Wiz is phenomenal in both regards: team and product.
Assaf: Has anything in particular stood out to you since joining the company?
Emily: It’s been interesting to see how the Wiz business strategy is driven in partnership with your customers, giving them a significant voice in the products that are built. And I think part of the reason for that is we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to the applications and implementations of the technology that Wiz is spearheading. There’s so much potential for transformation in this industry, and we’re really onto something here.
On another note, the culture that’s been embedded at Wiz since its inception is really powerful. But it is also matched by a strong sense of humility – which is why the Wiz team really is able to listen to the market and to what its customers need.
Assaf: Where do you see Wiz headed moving forward?
Emily: I’m very excited to see how the product is evolving when it comes to threat detection and response. There’s a creative element that is unique to this product development which has to do with charting new territories – Wiz creates a fabric that lights up and defines an architecture that companies simply couldn’t see before. The importance of this feat cannot be underestimated. That’s why Wiz is surpassing the competition and incumbents, and there’s still a lot of room for new product offerings that don’t exist out there today.
Having said that, it is important to define a strategy, and I think the challenge for Wiz will be deciding what not to do. This can be tough because there’s such a wide greenfield out there for us to explore. Having a strategy doesn’t mean that things are set in stone, but every business needs a north star to walk towards and measure itself along the way. It’s about having intent. That’s one area where I hope to help and participate in this fantastic journey that Wiz is carving for itself. The security space is still hungry for innovation and there’s still so much to do. Let’s not forget: we’re fighting crime here. Security is such an unusual industry in that one can get lost in the bits, bites, notifications, and alerts, you almost forget that there are criminals on the other side of all this. There’s crime happening, and crime is not going away. So we need lots of innovation to get ahead of it. And this is how I see Wiz continuing to move ahead: fueled by creativity and innovation.
Learn how Wiz's continuous innovation helps customers protect their cloud environments here.
