Closing CISO-CEO Communication Gap Requires a Common Business Language – Sumedh Thakar – BSW #357
Back in April, we covered a story on episode #348 titled "CISO-CEO communication gaps continue to undermine cybersecurity". In that article, Sumedh Thakar, the CEO at Qualys, stated "CISOs must translate technical risks into business impact for CEOs." But he didn't say how. So, we invited him on the show to explain. In this episode, Sumedh walks us through real life interactions with his CISO and Board and explains why security needs to be communicated in business terms.
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Guest
As CEO, Sumedh leads the company’s vision, strategic direction and implementation. He joined Qualys in 2003 in engineering and grew within the company, taking various leadership roles focused on helping Qualys deliver on its platform vision. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Product Officer at Qualys, where he oversaw all things product, including engineering, development, product management, cloud operations, DevOps, and customer support. A product fanatic and engineer at heart, he is a driving force behind expanding the platform from Vulnerability Management into broader areas of security and compliance, helping customers consolidate their security stack. This includes the rollout of the game-changing VMDR (Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response) that continually detects and prevents risk to their systems, Multi-Vector EDR, which focuses on protecting endpoints as well as Container Security, Compliance and Web Application Security solutions. Sumedh was also instrumental in the build-up of multiple Qualys sites resulting in a global 24×7 follow-the-sun product team.
Sumedh is a long-time proponent of SaaS and cloud computing. He previously worked at Intacct, a cloud-based financial and accounting software provider. He also worked at Northwest Airlines developing complex algorithms for its yield and revenue management reservation system. Sumedh has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering with distinction from the University of Pune.
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