Wiz’s Yinon Costica: Using a self-serve model to better equip organizations and improve security posture

In this season’s finale of the Future of Security Operations podcast, Thomas chats with Yinon Costica, Vice President of Product and co-founder at Wiz, the leading cloud infrastructure security platform that enables organizations to identify and remove the most pressing risks in the cloud.

Yinon has more than 15 years of experience leading cybersecurity product development teams, with expertise in the cloud security market. Yinon started his career as a software engineer at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). After this, he was the VP of Adallom, a leading cloud access security broker, until they were acquired by Microsoft in 2015. At Microsoft, he led the Cloud Security Group product organization for four years before co-founding Wiz.

Topics include: 

• Yinon’s journey, starting with the Israel Defense Forces, and how it led to his introduction to cybersecurity. 
• The decision process behind building Wiz and how the original idea for the company changed and developed during this time. 
• Yinon’s view on the changing landscape of security over the last 20 years and how it has become a C-level discussion. 
• Measuring how mature your company’s security operations are and the process of wider teams becoming more proactive about security.
• The self-serve model of security used at Wiz and how companies can employ this to create a more secure environment across the enterprise. 
• Approaching the challenge of gaining Fortune 100 customers when running a start-up and what it takes to build an enterprise-grade product. 
• The specific challenges that those who are leading security teams in fast-growing tech startups face when approaching the cloud.
• Stepping back to find toxic combinations in your organization that need to be remediated first when evaluating levels of prioritization. 
• What the security operations landscape will look like in five years and how the self-serve model will fit into this. 
• Some lessons Yinon has learned from the close relationships that the Wiz founding members have built up over the last 20 years.
• Taking steps to overcome the issue of diversity and bias in the security space.

Resources: LinkedIn