SOARing Below New York City

Just spent an amazing week in New Jersey with my new colleagues at iSMG and got to participate in an executive roundtable with 17 impressive CISOs from many of the major financial services companies and banks in New York along with the co-founder of Rapid7.

The venue was the ‘hidden’ wine cellar dining room under the 21 club on West 52nd street right in the middle of Christmas crazy season in Manhattan. What an event!

That plumbing you see here frames the speakeasy style entrance to the room and insists that you step up, over and down the other side as you enter, following ingress through the kitchen ala that classic moment in the Goodfellas when Henry takes Karen through the rear entrance of The Copacabana Club in New York.

A truly memorable 7-course meal followed, complete with wine pairings, great conversations led by our inimitable and charming iSMG host, Nick Holland, and insights into the SOAR space by Rapid7’s co-founder and CTO, Tas Giakouminakis. Having been an integration partner with Rapid7 in the past, I was impressed with the company’s evolution and expanded portfolio of offerings so well suited to the challenges of the cybersecurity defense space in 2019 and beyond.

In particular, their comprehensive and unified Insight Cloud platform delivers unprecedented visibility, analytics, and automation that all CISOs need to enable their security teams to work more efficiently and much smarter than ever before.

One of the many highlights of my evening was the couple of hours I spent on the train and with an Uber driver alongside my two iSMG companions, Nicole Gaylord and Gina Stillman who were the incredible event warriors who planned, executed and made sure that this whole thing came off without a hitch.

I especially loved the segments on their dogs and their husbands’ travails on stalking and bringing home the ‘perfect’ Christmas trees.

I learned among other things, that “you never let husbands out alone to do anything important”.

I also learned from a deep dive into their expanded solution offerings, why Rapid7 is a leader in the increasingly crowded security automation space which is easily confirmed by their 3rd quarter results reflecting an annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of $310.2 million, an increase of 43% compared to Q3 last year. There are apparently a number of customer end users who agree with my assessment as well.

The ability to get in front of senior information security practitioners from some of the most sophisticated enterprises, in a safe, non-selling context to dig deep into a prominent vendor’s technology and pull apart their solution capabilities against real-world (aka non-marketing-imagined) threats is pure gold.

And, the subsequent feedback I have received from every participant just cements that value.

So, while this post is not a plug for executive roundtables (iSMG-style), any vendor in the space would be crazy to pass up such an opportunity. And any CISO who is grappling with challenges in SecOps, Vulnerability Management, Endpoint Protection, Docker and Container Security, Managed Detection and Response, SOAR or the rest of it would serve themselves well to look into the Rapid7 playbook.

As for me, I am thrilled to be a part of this great organization and can’t wait to jump on the road again with our next sponsor and CISO group to discover more about emerging technologies that can positively impact this endless battle against bad actors in modern cyber-space.