Name: How Cybersecurity Became A Top Priority For Business Leaders
Uploaded: 2024-09-20
Duration: 7 min 40 s
Description: Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Says Data Security Is No Longer Just A Concern For CIOs.

 Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Says Data Security Is No Longer Just A Concern For CIOs.

How Cybersecurity Became A Top Priority For Business Leaders

Photo Illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by Palo Alto Networks. 

Leadership

Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Diane Brady. You know, one of the things that's fascinating, the perk you sit and you get into rooms, we don't get to go in terms of talking to CEO S about the vulnerabilities. And I say CEO S deliberately because it feels like this is an issue that has really left just the CIO or the CTO. Give me a sense as to what, what are they thinking about and how, how is the threat environment changing? Because we're right in the middle of this obsession with digital transition. What are you hearing? We can't seem to buy ingest and deploy enough technology today. I mean, you look at what's going on with A I. People are buying GP US. They're trying to put up A I data centers, everybody's in a frenzy. How do I use LL MS in my infrastructure? So you, you think you just sort of just sat down and settled down and say, oh my God, thank God. We've moved to the public cloud and they sit there and say, oh my God, look what's next A I, so I think every CEO has some sort of large technology project on their agenda and the number one risk now slowly and steadily continues to be cyber. And that's what we talked about. The sort of explosion of, you know, tax service, explosion of our connectivity to our customers that's causing that to become a large rift. So it's kind of impossible to get away from a conversation around cyber security at your board, at your management team. It's still a bit of a black box to be honest. But you know, it's like, it's like I know I have a problem, I don't know how to solve it, but I know I have a problem. I need to pay attention. So I think we're at that phase where CEO S are aware, this is a problem. Some of them are hoping it doesn't happen to them because it happened to somebody else in their industry. But they call the cio and technology guys and say, hey, do we have, do we have a solution for this? And you know, like most of the life, we always say, yes, we've got this covered. But the question is how well do you have it covered? You've lived through these, you know, boom and bust cycles. Obviously, we've seen this acceleration of technology innovation, but we talk about A I as if it's some incredibly profound pivot point where now, you know, put on your seat belt, here we go. It's gonna be the most transformative thing since whatever, what do you think? There's that cliche that we always seem to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, right? You go back to 1999. You know, if you remember the internet sort of boom where all you needed was a domain name and you were a number of clicks to find your money. The world wasn't a frenzy. You know, the NASDAQ was 5000 at that point in time, it came crashing down to 3000. So there was that sort of exuberance associated with this revolutionary technology called internet. Now, I don't think we were wrong if you go back and say, what did we imagine in 1999 I think any domain you thought you bought actually exists today. There's a business around it. So these real businesses, some of the largest business in the world are driven by the emergence of the internet. So it was just, we were early, I think we're the same, same sort of cycle with A I. There is tremendous amounts of enthusiasm. There is sort of like this notion that if you build it, they will come and we're all busy building it. And I think it's following the same cycle that we saw with the internet first. You need the infrastructure. That's why you're seeing the sort of the, the the infrastructure players in A I are gonna do. Well, in the current term, you look at all the chip manufacturers that people talk about energy, people talk about the need for data centers. So you see the infrastructure part, you know, the the technology is still a little ways from all of us embracing it fully and going and deploying it. But I think uh you know, we feel a little left out because cybersecurity was on the top of mind for CEO S six months ago. It's possibly A I now, right? Because like they all want to talk about A I, they all want to be smarter about it. They're all worried that if I miss the I trend, you know, is there a new Amazon and I become the old Ecommerce company? I'd love to walk through a little bit. The perspective you bring you from T Mobile, you mentioned your time at Google. You were in, I believe almost two years at Softbank. How, how did those experiences? Well, let me just ask some of those pivot points maybe in your career. That kind of took you to where you are now. My first job in the US was a fidelity. It was 1992. Uh and it was uh one of those session moments where it was very hard to get a job. So I had to literally apply to 400 plus places to see like somebody would hire me. And I, I had the funniest experiences and we had a recruiter on the phone saying, oh, can you tell me, we don't know. That course is offered in Northwestern. I'm like, no, I went to Northeast. Oh, excuse me, let me check and boom. Like, so like people, you know, all kinds of stuff happened and I was lucky that I, you know, I applied to Fidelity with seven different people. Thankfully, they had no common hr system at that point in time. So people said no, uh the seventh person didn't know that six. I said no. So they had me come interview and, and I was lucky enough to get hired. And then I ended up going to work at Deutsche Telecom in all places because I've met the CEO by being a telecom analyst and he says you should go work for me. So I did and then a little set up little entrepreneurial roots in there. So I go, I go start a mobile internet company. This is like the before the iphone existed. We used to have these really clunky phones from Nokia, which used to try and give you mobile internet access when people say you crazy. Um I did that and then I worked at Deutsche Telecom and T Mobile for four years in Germany. I used to commute from London to Germany trying to see if I wanted to be an operational executive in a mobile telecom company, which I did. And then I was home and a friend of mine walked up and said, you know what? There's this company from California, which just went public in a very strange reverse dutch auction, which nobody should do. And they're looking for somebody to work in Europe. They have a small 5000 square foot office. And so how it is rented or so was Chief Business Officer. That's not a title, you hear very often. What does that mean? You know, I started in Europe. I was lucky enough that Larry and Sergey were traveling through Europe. Uh Coincidentally they interviewed me there. I had a great boss of me who interviewed me and they decided that uh they'd have me run Google Europe and you know, there was an amazing market. Uh We had lots of great people who worked there. Many of them are still at Google and run large parts of Google. And we were able to make Europe grow and stabilize uh Google's European presence to such a degree that, you know, they uh asked me to come from the rest of the world and including Europe from here because when my peers were Tim Armstrong and Cheryl went on to have amazing careers in different places and maybe I was the last man standing. So here I was, uh I came to California in 2009 and I spent five years doing anything but products because, you know, it's like Eric was my boss for a while and Larry was my boss for a while. And Larry wanted to focus on the technology part. So go go take care of the business stuff. We had a great CFO great have legal and I kind of did everything that wasn't product. So it was sales marketing, customer support, business development deals. I was lucky I was blessed because you know, here I was working for an amazing technology company going to perhaps the biggest growth phase and, and I had, I had sort of the privilege of observing from that lens how the world was accepting technology, accepting the emergence of big tech, I guess at that point in time, it is great.