In The Boardroom™ With...

Ron Gula
CEO

GULA TECH ADVENTURES

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Ron. It’s an honor to speak with the former CEO and co-founder of Tenable Network Security.  Please tell us about Gula Tech and its current portfolio.  Any wins or success stories among this impressive group of Cyber Hygiene, Threat Management and Web Security companies you’d like to mention?

Ron Gula: Thanks for asking. Cyndi and I founded Gula Tech because we wanted to work with the next generation of cyber companies. We had worked both at Tenable Network Security and at Network Security Wizards where we built the Dragon Intrusion Detection System. She brings operational expertise such as HR, sales operations, facilities, among others. This expertise complements the experience I have bringing cyber solutions to market. The last few years at Tenable, we were very active angel investors and saw an exit of ThreatGrid to Cisco systems. In 2017, one of Gula Tech’s first investments, Red Owl, had an exit to Raytheon. At RSA this year, 12 of our 25 investments will have some sort of booth or presence. One of which, StackRox, was selected to be in the innovation sandbox. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  Youwill be speaking at the upcoming Cyber Investing Summit on May 15in New York City.  What topics will you be discussing?

Ron Gula: I will be speaking on a panel on venture capital. I'm looking forward to discussing a variety of cyber market trends including the over-hype of artificial intelligence, risk management and threat hunting. There is a place for each of these technologies, but they are in crowded spaces and have under-delivered to customers for a variety of reasons. I'm also going to speak about threats that are under-hyped, such as how easy it is to eavesdrop on phone calls. I also hope to offer some thoughts on regionalized cyber investing as the companies coming to market in New York City are much different than those in D.C. and in Silicon Valley. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We’re all familiar with the headlines about Equifax, Uber and Orbitz and more recently the ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta, plus reports of tainted data in blockchain transactions. What is your perspective regarding best practices that should be followed by the public and private sector in this environment?  

Ron Gula: Cyber is a lot like health care - you can eat right, exercise and see your doctor but still get a terminal disease. As an industry, we don’t agree on the value of our data and what we should do to protect it. At a minimum, your data readers should be 100% compliant with regulations that pertains to it. We should have a conversation with board senior leadership about IT framework such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework. The risks need to be understood and assumed by business leaders and not within the IT organization alone. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  What does the Ron Gula crystal ball reveal regarding cybersecurity headlines in the coming year? 

Ron Gula: There are a lot of competing trends - Nation states will continue to require data be kept within their geographical borders. Attacks on common infrastructure such as Salesforce or Amazon or common Windows or open source building blocks will become more destructive. The march to the cloud won't go as far as people anticipate because cost is a larger factor than ease of building scalable applications and requiring them to have a presence in multiple locations. Lastly, the lack of a trained cyber workforce in the US will continue to hinder secure operations, but it will be more secure here than in other countries. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thanks again for joining us today, Ron.