Creating consensus through community: Leadership lessons from the world of cybersecurity with CISO Betsy Bevilacqua

For Betsy B. , empathy has always been at the core of her business philosophy. Betsy has worked as a security leader for corporate giants like eBay and Facebook, has held CISO titles in both the tech and healthcare industries, and is the co-founder of her own cybersecurity company, Tabiri Analytics, Inc. But despite that heady resume, she takes the most pride in being someone others truly want to work with.??

“Building consensus is always one of the most challenging aspects of security leadership, and it is impossible if you can’t communicate and receive feedback effectively. It’s easy to get caught up in your own goals, creating rifts between you and your partners,” she said.?

“Empathy is the root of consensus.”

Born and raised in Kenya, Betsy was on track to become a lawyer from an early age. And she might have, had she not attended one of the few primary schools in the country that had a computer lab. The moment she met her first Apple 2E, it was love at first sight. She was fascinated not just by how computers were built, but by how they could be applied to positively impact society.?

As a teenager, she convinced her parents to let her head to the US, and they helped her buy a ticket to Buffalo, NY, where she would stay with family friends and tour schools. Her father handed her 200 dollars cash. This would turn out to be one of the best seed investments in the history of cybersecurity.?

Betsy landed at JFK and promptly hopped into a smaller 20 person plane headed for snowy upstate New York. Having just descended over the towering Manhattan skyline, the sleepy, winterbound setting around Buffalo came as a bit of a surprise. When an epic snowstorm hit the East Coast shortly after (seven feet in 24 hours!), she recalls serious culture shock and her parents urging her to come home. There were moments of doubt, but Betsy remained committed to the journey. Over the next few months, with the help of her billet family, she toured colleges up and down the East Coast. She found her fit at Canisius University where she quickly obtained a BS in Information Systems.??

It was during her graduate school program that Betsy met a professor working for FBI cyber crimes. She was a colorful character, replete with a throwback fashion sense straight out of The Untouchables, who instilled in Betsy a deep interest in cybersecurity. Though it was a relatively new discipline at the time, it made perfect sense to her—combining her love of technology with her passion for making a difference in people’s lives by protecting them against this new kind of threat.

“There is something to be said about adopting new technology and adopting it quickly. But the downside of that can be the impact it has on humanity, and on the lives of individuals,” she said. “Balancing those two sides, enabling a company to get to their mission and making sure it happens the right way is a role I love.”?

Betsy’s career grew quickly, despite the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, she finished her MBA program and was promoted to the role of CISO for Independent Health, a medical insurance company. But the heart of the tech industry called. She and her husband packed up and headed for the Bay Area, where she quickly landed at eBay as a senior manager of information security. She describes the experience of driving through Silicon Valley poetically. “Seeing all of the buildings and logos was like watching my desktop come to life,” she recalled.??

Over the last ten years, Betsy has held security leadership titles for an array of companies, gaining a wealth of experience dealing with not only security threats, but with the politics unique to those in security roles. The value she places on empathy and collaboration has been informed by her unique journey, and is core to what makes her such an effective leader.?

“People have taken lots of chances on me. I didn’t get here by myself,” she said. “The family that took me in not only made landing here easier, but they taught me about American culture. They gave me context, which can be completely isolating not to have.”

“Even something as simple as going to meals with your coworkers can be a huge, stress-inducing experience if you haven’t grown up dining in a fancy restaurant,” she continued. “I’ve learned the importance of leaning on your community. And if you don’t have one, create one.”?

This relationship-driven approach has served Betsy well, particularly in the world of cybersecurity, where collaboration between different groups and business units is essential.??

“When you’re in security, you can’t really make big moves on your own. You rely a lot on relationships,” she said. “The biggest challenge is often knowing when and how much to push for something. Being a security leader can be a very isolating role, facing off with engineering or product leaders to stand up for what at the end of the day is the right move for safety. It is a role that can make you feel like an outsider to some extent, often in a position of trying to get everyone else in the room to listen.”?

Betsy believes success in her role as a security leader simply comes down to making a difference. She gets satisfaction from knowing that she's moved the needle in a given area, that she's made the company stronger with her presence than it was before. But her greatest joy stems from the human component, watching the people she has hired into the industry and guided along the way find their own success.?

"Having someone trust you with their career and knowing that you made a positive difference in their lives is incredibly meaningful," she said.

Today, Betsy is responsible for business strategy at Tabiri Analytics, a cybersecurity firm she co-founded in 2018. In addition, she also serves as a mentor and advisor to startups in the security space. She sees the field of security leadership changing actively, and warns up-and-coming CISOs not to be overly consumed by the technical aspects of the job. Instead, she advises, they’d be better served long-term by thinking more about the operating environments of the businesses they serve (both internal and external factors) and how they may impact security at a holistic level. Betsy believes that over the next few years CISOs will have a greater influence on business strategy and direction given all the changes that are happening on the legal and regulatory front especially in the US as companies navigate cybersecurity disclosure requirements.

“If we just take a pause and look at the last 3 years—we’ve lived through a global pandemic, geopolitical tensions that have reached fever pitch with the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict, and extreme weather events all within an environment of rapid technological advances. All of these changes have a direct if not indirect impact on a company's security posture. For someone coming up the CISO path, it’s critical to tap into that superpower that I find comes naturally to a lot of people in the security field: identifying patterns, connecting the dots and anticipating different outcomes.”