Last time, I got the opportunity to speak with Jessica Hebenstreit. Not only is she a senior security consultant who has had a lot of different roles; she’s also the chief Operating Officer of the Diana Initiative. I learned a lot from our discussion. This time, I got to speak with Monica Jain, co-founder of LogicHub Inc. It takes a lot of hard work to run such a successful company, and she taught me a bit about SIEM. Kim Crawley: Hi Monica! Please tell me about what you do and how you got there. Monica Jain: I am a co-founder of a security company named LogicHub Inc. How I got here is a journey of 18 years since I have been building and managing security products including leading SIEM products like ArcSight ESM. I always had passion to talk to my security customers, listening to their pain points and understanding why it is a pain point for them. Lot of times, customer don't tell you what to build but they tell you their pain points. If you listen with keen interest and focus, you will start imagining a product. LogicHub was born out of those learnings from my security customers over last 18 years. KC: SIEM sure has evolved in the past decade or so. Can you explain how? MJ: SIEM in 2000 started with one mission, which was to collect data from various security tools, normalize the data in one common format and then be able to ask questions from that data in real time. From there on, SIEM evolved into ability to do deeper correlations across multiple data points to detect advanced sophisticated attacks. Around 2006, SIEM also evolved to be able to handle large data sets to do historical analysis along with real time analysis. Until then, SIEM was used to ask questions you knew about. But then it took another set of capabilities around 2012 to know what you don't know using machine learning and behavior analytics to further mature the attack detection capabilities and lately automation is the key to further expedite the threat detection capabilities of SIEM. KC: What has founding LogicHub taught you so far? MJ: Founding LogicHub has taught me persistence. At startups, there are ups and downs with respect to your business, market conditions, team, customers, deals almost every day, but persistence along with hard work is the key. You just have to keep on going with full faith, hard work and positive attitude. Results will come naturally after that. KC: What are some misconceptions people have about what you do? MJ: People may have misconceptions that my role is only managing product, but as a founder, you need to do everything from picking up milk for the team in the early days to negotiating deals with your initial customers to wearing multiple hats depending on what is needed to move the business forward. Of course, a big part of my role is a relentless focus on understanding customers' pain points really well. Sometimes people think we just had an idea come into our heads, and we started the company around that. The truth is that we conducted hundreds of interviews with customers to identify what they were really struggling with. From there, we realized we could solve it using advanced automation. It is a lot of hard work, but when you get it right, there is nothing quite as rewarding! KC: What do you think the biggest problems in cybersecurity are these days? MJ: I think the biggest problem in cyber security is the lack of skilled security professionals globally. We have so much data to process but a limited number of people with security domain expertise. Data is increasing every second but not the skilled people. Therefore, automation is a must in cybersecurity. KC: Excellent. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we go? MJ: Yes, I would like to encourage more women in cyber security. In my last 18 years of career in security, I have met very few women at CISO level or security in general. I would say less than 10% of my customers are women. Why is that? We need to think about it as an industry. We need to do more encouragement to bring more women power in security and IT in general. In my personal experience, I have always been supported by my customers, and 90% of them are male. I recently received "Security champion of the year" award, and I give credit back to my customers who have always been supporting me. How can we bring more of such support and encourage more women in IT? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtFKtv0FbvE Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this guest author article are solely those of the contributor, and do not necessarily reflect those of Tripwire, Inc.
