Security leaders and practitioners meet with Expletives to share perspectives and best practices for tackling today’s cybersecurity trends

Expel, the managed security provider that aims to make security easy to understand, use and improve, recently hosted its first in-person Executive Advisory Board (EAB) and Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“Expel is all about candid and transparent communications with our customers. The EAB and CAB provide opportunities for us to glean an intimate understanding of the challenges our customers face. This perspective proves extremely valuable as we chart the best ways to support our customers in the future,” said Dave Merkel, co-founder and CEO of Expel.

The Expel EAB

The Expel EAB consists of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and security leaders from a diverse set of industries and company sizes who meet with Expel executives quarterly to engage in robust dialogs about the strategic opportunities and critical issues facing cybersecurity teams and practitioners today. The EAB provides a forum for leaders to share and learn from one another, discuss macroeconomic conditions shaping their industries, and network with other leading security professionals.

At its recent meeting, the EAB discussed a range of topics, including:

• Managing SaaS application data risk: The group agreed that security teams must invest significant time and resources to manage SaaS data risk at scale, and that they should continue to advocate for alignment within their respective industries on data and privacy.
• Building advocates within the board: If not already doing so, CISOs must seek opportunities to align with risk owners, and educate board members on cyber risk, “what good looks like,” and how to hold the company accountable.
• Continued focus on security fundamentals: To be the “first line of defense,” security teams must continue to build and foster relationships within their organizations to educate employees on potential threats.

EAB attendees included security leaders from companies including Affirm, Inc., Hogan Lovells, and United Talent Agency, among others.

“The Expel EAB gives me the chance to discuss and tackle a lot of the important issues facing my organization and team with other folks who’ve been in my shoes. I also get to provide input that I feel will help Expel continue contributing to our security success,” said Ernest Liu, CISO, United Talent Agency. “We’ve had some really productive strategic conversations, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work closely with this group.”

The Expel CAB

The Expel CAB is a group of cybersecurity practitioners who manage security at their respective organizations. The CAB helps explain the challenges that Security Operations Center (SOC) personnel encounter day-in and day-out, so that Expel can tailor its solutions to help address those challenges.

At the recent CAB meeting, participants discussed:

• The importance of strategic partnerships and integrations: Members agreed that successfully integrating new technology into the cybersecurity stack is about more than the technology. Security teams need vendor partnerships that suit their technology and business needs.
• Providing useful threat intelligence: To make effective decisions quickly, members discussed the need for threat intelligence on global security trends and attack techniques, and the probability that it will affect their organizations. Teams need context and information-rich threat bulletins to quickly remediate threats and incidents.
• The role that company culture plays in the SOC: Given the demands on security professionals to deal with an increasing frequency of highly sophisticated threats, a positive company culture—which includes providing challenging and interesting work, offering growth opportunities, tolerating of mistakes, and knowing the importance of analysts’ roles—can provide much-needed support to analysts.

“One of the things I like most about the Expel CAB is that I and all the members are encouraged to give honest feedback about how we engage with Expel, and the team really listens to the things we care about most,” said Jonathan Waldrop, Senior Director, Cyber Security at Insight Global. “It was great to meet and collaborate with the Expel team, but also my counterparts at other organizations. We all play a critical role in cyber defense.”

Some of the Expel CAB member companies represented include Fastly, Insight Global, and Lupl, among others.

If you’re interested in learning more about Expel’s customers and how Expel improves their cybersecurity capabilities, visit the Expel customer page.

About Expel

Expel helps companies of all shapes and sizes minimize business risk. Our technology and people work together to make sense of security signals—with your business in mind—to detect, understand, and fix issues fast. Expel offers managed detection and response (MDR), remediation, phishing, and threat hunting. For more information, visit our website, check out our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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