Always on, using our years of experience to provide insight
Andrew Gogarty, Secon’s Chief Security Evangelist, had a vision of starting marketing career after earning his degree 20 years ago. He had accepted a place on a graduate scheme at a marketing agency, but decided to temp at a telemarketing agency over the summer to earn some extra money before the programme began.
However, his career trajectory was turned on its head when Andrew was approached by a recruiter asking if he was interested in a permanent position in internet security. He said:
I have always had an interest in technology and computing and whilst I advised [the recruiter] that I wasn’t looking, they positioned a role at Secon that I thought would be stupid not to interview for. A few weeks later I turned down my graduate role at the marketing agency, started my journey in cyber security, and have never looked back since.
There have been many lessons learned on Andrew’s cyber security journey, one notable example being when Andrew received an inbound call from a small business that had been hit by ransomware. Unfortunately, they had not followed many cyber security best practices, especially in maintaining backups. Their only usable backup had become corrupted. This meant the company lost over a year’s worth of data and had to rebuild everything from scratch.
They took security more seriously after that as they experienced a lot of pain and reputational damage, like having to speak to customers to help build back up their data. But due to their poor practices, unfortunately I knew I couldn’t really help them recover from what had happened.
This experience made the consequences of poor cyber security practices real for Andrew and motivated him to do everything he could to help organisations prevent similar situations.
Always on, cutting through the noise.
Andrew’s core message to organisations is you need to remember that the cyber security landscape is constantly changing. Hackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures continue to evolve, and new market innovations emerge to address these new measures.
Whilst there are some great cyber security solutions out there, organisations themselves are challenged with ensuring they are executing on the basics such as patching and receiving value from their existing investments. Just plugging in more tools is not the solution, particularly when organisations are already struggling to stay on top of existing implementations due to resource constraints. He commented:
Helping organisations strike a balance of good security that can be effectively maintained is one of the biggest challenges, although this is the challenge I always find the most satisfying to solve.
One of the most rewarding challenges Andrew looks forward to is helping Secon’s Managed Detection and Response customers continue to improve their cyber resilience based on the behaviours we’re seeing in their environments. He says it’s incredibly fulfilling to see our clients improve their visibility, resilience, and control from simple configuration-related remediations.
This is also the time of year Andrew starts thinking about trends and predictions for the year ahead and reflecting on his previous security predictions in order to ensure Secon’s clients can prepare themselves for evolving threats. Andrew embraces being always on for our customers, whether this means providing clients with his years of knowledge and insight, or being ready to act the moment they need help. Whether it’s for advice, help with solving an existing challenge, or responding to an incident, at Secon, we’re always on and ready.
For Andrew, the last 20 years at Secon has been a rewarding journey of continuous learning and self-development. He’s not only gained a wealth of knowledge about the industry and cyber security best practices, but he’s also used the valuable lessons he’s learned to help Secon’s clients solve their cyber security challenges and transform their security operations.
