Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 1)

Fred discusses the network security risks continuing to escalate with an increasingly connected universe of things.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to PacketSled.

Fred Wilmot: I’m the interim CEO and the CTO of PacketSled. We are a security platform company founded by security practitioners to help dramatically reduce the expertise, time, and complexity for practitioners to detect, identify, and respond to threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what other industry trends are you seeing and how that is playing into your work.

Fred Wilmot: We’ve been spending a lot of time in healthcare and industrial control systems. Where that’s become relevant is not just the growth of the market of IoT, but also the propensity for those things to do harm. The difference between the standard operating procedures of a breach in IT is loss of revenue or a loss of confidential information. There’re a lot of places where this is covered now.

The other part of the infrastructure that’s connected in operational technology is being joined together with IT now. There’re deeper implications. These are security implications that are more safety-driven as opposed to being financially-driven. The motivations may not be different from a threat vector perspective but it’s certainly a lot more impactful when there’s a potential concern for loss of life as opposed to just a loss of revenue or intellectual property.

Sramana Mitra: One thing I like to do in these kinds of interviews, especially since cyber security is such a crowded field, is paint an ecosystem map. Where do you play in the cyber security ecosystem and who are the key competitors?

Fred Wilmot: We’re a network security monitoring software. We sit in the network forensic technology space. We also sit in the threat hunting space. These are the emerging areas past the current infrastructure that include network visibility and end points. Our common competitors are Darktrace, ProtectWise or something along those lines. These are folks that are looking to do network forensic technology like acquisition of data and do something about it either on the cloud or on-premise.

Sramana Mitra: Do you and these competitors go to market directly or do you OEM your technology? What is the go-to-market strategy?

Fred Wilmot: That’s a good question. Each has chosen a different direction in some sense. We are very partner-heavy. We include a large chunk of our business as the functional part of managed services. That includes a very significant competitive differentiator. We are used by folks that do instant response and brief response work. If you’re a practitioner, this is a practitioner’s platform.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled
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