Why I joined Thrive – The ability to deliver a superior customer experience

I joined Thrive to lead the European sales team and to work with a global brand with an outstanding reputation for innovating cybersecurity, Cloud and Collaboration managed services. I am excited about the opportunity that it presents for myself and the organisations I engage with day to day. The most key factor for me was the ability to deliver a superior customer experience.

It is apparent to everyone in this industry that the lack of resource is the most pressing challenge for Cybersecurity professionals. I have yet to meet a CISO who is awash with free time and has an armada of help available should they need it. The vast of majority of security professionals have multiple projects running simultaneously and are having to balance managing board expectations, running security ops, training the internal client and the multitude of vendor relationships that need to be serviced.

These challenges magnify even further in the smaller business as there is often no CISO and sometimes no member of the team with security in the title. It is often left to someone to manage security as a second job or voluntarily include it in their remit. I have come across organisations in the thousands of users with no head of cybersecurity. Sometimes this is due to rapid growth and sometimes unfortunately, it is due to the “we’ve never had a problem” mindset.

Lack of resource is often the driver when the customer goes to market for a cybersecurity project but I feel that sometimes that challenge is often deliberately misinterpreted by vendors to suit their project portfolios and strategies.  For instance, a vendor’s strategy could be built around AI and the rhetoric is that due to the AI tech there will be no need for additional resource. This strategy works well for the vendor as it’s able to sell high margin software, increasing the stock price and satisfying the shareholders but is it really solving the customers problem?

I have come across many customers in the last few years who have purchased appliances and software and are frankly in no better position than they were. They have no one to manage the output from the product they have purchased which can mean alerts can be missed and misunderstood. I have actually had a customer say to me about a security product they had purchased “I know it’s doing something but I have no idea how to interpret the alerts.”

Further to this, anyone who has recently been involved in the RFP for a cybersecurity solution will see from the myriad of responses they receive that there is always a misinterpretation of the core challenge, deliberately or not. This is due to the shear amount of cybersecurity vendors and often, the vendor strategy not being able to address the challenge. Customers are having to be prescriptive in their requirements to root out the misdirection and the partial responses. I have been delighted to see an increase militance from customers around staying true to solving their core challenge.

I believe that overcoming lack of available resource can be addressed by combination of people, process and technology. It was important to me to join an organisation that can help IT and security professionals with their full security programme and actually provide much needed relief for overworked and under stress cybersecurity professionals. At Thrive, we have the ability to sit side by side with the customer and work together to solve their challenges and that excites me!