Rubrik Chief Product Officer Anneka Gupta has advice for midmarket IT leaders when it comes to their cyber resilience strategies.
"It's really easy to boil the ocean and say, 'Hey, I have to do everything all at once to secure my organization,'" she said.
Instead, IT leaders should focus on cybersecurity basics.
"What are the basic controls that I need to get in place? What are the basic measures that I need to get in place to make sure that I can recover?" Gupta advised.
With 20 years of experience in tech and cybersecurity, Gupta has seen a lot in the security space during her rise to the C-suite level at Rubrik. When it comes to cyberattacks, "it's not a matter of if but a matter of when someone is going to breach your organization."
Her message for IT leaders: "No matter how much time you invest, how much technology you will buy, you're not going to be able to fully prevent attacks. And I think that sometimes gets lost in the fray," Gupta told MES Computing.
"That getting back to basics I think is super important, especially for organizations that don't have massive amounts of resources and massive amounts of sophistication from a technology perspective," she added.
Rubrik's Midmarket Focus
Rubrik is a cybersecurity company with a focus on zero trust data security. Since the company's founding in 2014, it has aimed at ensuring ease of use in its products, Gupta said.
"When you're thinking about cyber recovery and being able to recover applications and data, whether those sit on-premises or in public cloud, or whether using [Software-as-a-Service] applications, that can be a very, very complex landscape," she said.
"What we have done with our products is really focus down on how do we create simplicity without removing the power and flexibility such that you can easily get up and running, you can easily monitor your environment, you can easily take action without having to do copious amounts of investigation, without having to manage copious amounts of infrastructure and going through multiple [user interfaces] and multiple different experiences to try to take that that action that you need to take," Gupta said.
"We've seen feedback among our midmarket customers that it's just so easy. And that has enabled our customers to free up a lot of their time, often hours, sometimes days of time a week, to be able to focus on other areas that are part of their jobs, that require a lot more thinking or strategy so that they're not just having to spend their entire day managing the day to day of their infrastructure," she added.
Women In Tech In The C-Suite
Gupta also weighed in on being a woman in the C-suite in tech.
"I would have hoped that we would have made a lot more progress in getting more women into all levels ... into the C-level as well [and] within security, especially in an area that requires such diverse thinking and requires us to innovate and adapt quickly," she said.
"There's so much research done that diversity of voices, diversity of opinions and experiences really leads to better decisions and more innovation. I ... teach at Stanford. I teach a product management class in the business school, and I see a lot of students reaching out ... interested in getting into cybersecurity. There's a huge amount of opportunity in this area. I'm really encouraged, at the college level at least, [that] there's a lot more women who are interested in this space. I think, hopefully, over the next 20 years what we'll see is that will filter into C-level executives," she said.
"There's a lot of work to do in creating inclusive environments and really making sure that women can feel supported in succeeding in these roles," Gupta said. "As we work to progress and really create a shared responsibility and parenting and ... create more support networks and flexibility .. that's going to bring more women into more senior levels and organizations. But it's a lot of work. We have a lot of work ahead of us."
Despite efforts toward diversity and inclusion, women remain under-represented at executive levels in technology.
Only 25 percent of C-level positions at tech companies are filled by women, according to Women Tech Network.
In addition to pervasive pay inequality, 72 percent of women in tech said they felt uneasy about a "prevalent 'bro' culture" at work.
Only 5 percent of ethnic women account for C-suite level positions, Women Tech Network found.
