Pathlock, the leading provider of unified access orchestration, introduced Rick Howard, security expert and Zero Trust evangelist, as a board director. This strategic announcement comes on the heels of the company’s $20 million strategic growth investment from Vertica Capital Partners.
Howard’s industry insights will provide invaluable direction to Pathlock’s strategy as it expands its leadership in protecting critical business applications. Rick serves as the Chief Analyst, Chief Security Officer, and Senior Fellow at The CyberWire, a cybersecurity podcasting network. His CSO Perspectives podcasts are some of the most popular in the cybersecurity leadership community, with an international audience of thousands of industry executives. Rick has amassed a community of loyal followers who follow him for his forward-thinking content covering emerging topics such as Zero Trust, intrusion kill chain prevention, resilience, risk forecasting, and more.
“Zero Trust has emerged as a cybersecurity first principle strategy for all organizations designed to defeat adversary threat groups as they evolve their supply chain attacks, like the SolarWinds campaign, and move laterally within their victim’s networks,” said Howard.
“While organizations have historically focused on network, endpoint, and identity management systems to mature their Zero Trust posture, moving up the stack to layer seven, the application layer, makes complete sense in this new cloud world. Applications are the guideposts to where your material data sets reside. I am extremely excited about Pathlock’s unique approach to securing these applications.''
Howard will also bring valuable practitioner experience from decades of leadership in the cybersecurity industry. His prior roles include the Palo Alto Network’s CSO, the TASC CISO, the iDefense GM (a commercial cyber threat intelligence service at Verisign), the Counterpane Global SOC Director (one of the original MSSPs), and the Commander of the U.S. Army’s Computer Emergency Response Team where he coordinated network defense, network intelligence and network attack operations for the Army's global network.
“We are honored to have Rick join our board as we chart our expanded strategy as Pathlock,” said Anand Adya, Pathlock CEO. “Rick is an incredibly respected cybersecurity industry veteran and thought leader who will provide invaluable perspective as we continue to forge our path in Zero Trust. As a product-focused company, it was critical to ensure that we build around technical and industry expertise, from the board level down.”
Rick will be joining Philip Vorobeychik, Managing Director at Vertica Capital Partners, Vitaly Vorobeychik, Managing Director at Vertica Capital Partners, and Anand Adya, CEO of Pathlock, as a board director at Pathlock.
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