is revolutionizing network security by shifting it to the cloud. Gene Stevens, cofounder and CTO of ProtectWise, is the driving force behind the company’s innovative technology. Stevens was a Senior Software Engineer at MX Logic when it was acquired by McAfee, where he stayed on as a Principal Software Engineer. Since leaving McAfee, Stevens has become a serial entrepreneur, founding a number of tech companies in the Denver area. We caught up with him to hear his thoughts about the Colorado tech scene:
What technologies power your business? Our platform runs in AWS, and we are using a mix of open source and in-house, proprietary technologies. Some of the popular pieces of software we use are Cassandra and Solr, Kafka and Thrift, as well as Node.js, which powers our UI. Most of the heavy lifting on the platform is custom software that we have written with Scala and Akka. This includes everything from our ability to move and process massive streams of data at wire speed as well as our Time Machine for Threat Detection which maintains a context rich state of everything on the network coupled with a comprehensive sense of time and which makes it possible for us to discover previously unknown threats on your network using the latest threat intelligence.
What upcoming tech project are you most proud of? We’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback on our Visualizer - the user interface (UI) that delivers an at-a-glance view of your network’s health. From the outset, we wanted to improve on traditional security visualization--which was lackluster at best. Our Visualizer completely transformed security visualization by providing incident responders with vastly increased visibility into network activity, a rich set of forensic tools, and a way to de-noise the security environment and speed up response times.
We continue to push the envelope in this regard and are currently working to incorporate 3D and Virtual Reality capabilities to the interface while also experimenting with advanced gaming mechanics. All of these advancements will give security professionals a rich contextual experience with exploration and pattern matching so they can continue to quickly identify and respond to the network threats that matter most.
What trends do you see in the tech scene over the next three years? We see the continued shift toward the cloud as the primary form of compute and an accompanying shift in enterprise security away from fragmented, on-premises point solutions toward a new delivery model: namely, security delivered as a consolidated utility.
We see a rapidly expanding attack surface that now includes both cyber and physical assets because of the proliferation of connected things. For example, industrial controls, the Smart Grid, process controls—to name just a few—are now all connected over networks and connected to the internet, making them highly vulnerable. The innovation in the era of the Internet of Things is amazing. However, the pace of innovation is exceeding the ability of the existing security ecosystem to protect all these interconnected assets.
Related to these trends, we see a move away from traditional hierarchical network topologies toward decentralized and mesh networks. This is a world where many assets are directly connected to the internet, are characterized by vast arrays of highly specialized microservice architectures which maintain highly complex, yet loosely coupled relationships to each other and the external world.
What sort of people do you look for when hiring? We hire based on culture, passion and competence. Technology is a product of culture, and a high functioning team of the best people can accomplish anything. Startups run light and fast with minimal overhead, and so individual as well as collective passion is required to independently close any gap. Our ability to deliver big things at a rapid rate can only be accomplished by seasoned competence and high skill levels; we cannot make amateur mistakes and we cannot spend time learning what is already known.
Specifically, we at ProtectWise look for experienced engineers who are skilled in automation, distributed systems reasoning, asynchronous architectures, and high performance computing.
However, we are especially interested in people who are exceptionally good at what they don’t know. As a company built with innovation in mind, we must be able to handle new challenges, especially those that may be unexpected, at any given time, so we look for people for whom this is their normal.
Ultimately, my co-founder, Scott Chasin, and I are determined to build a company where everyone loves to show up for work and loves collaborating with their peers.
What are some lessons you’ve learned about working in Colorado? Words of wisdom? One of the great secrets regarding Colorado is that it has one of the most ambitious, well educated, informed and entrepreneurial populations in the world. The talent pool here is exceptional, and we’re far enough away from other ecosystems that we can risk going after big ideas. That said, you do have to work very hard to find the right talent, and the pool here is only so large. Toward that end, you must invest heavily in recruiting and in building a team who can magnetically draw the talent you need from the broader community. The entire company, talent level and overall proposition must be so compelling that candidates leave your office having a hard time considering doing anything else.
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