July 16, 2020
Data News Roundup – Thursday, July 16th, 2020
Today, we’re excited to introduce you to Dustin Webber, Chief Security Officer. He is one of a diverse group of people at AtScale contributes to our team with his unique talents. As recognition for the diverse team that we have built, AtScale was recently named as one of the “Best Big Data and Business Analytics Companies to Work for in 2020,” with 98% of our employees recommending our company to a friend.
What is your role at AtScale?
A: My role as Chief Security Officer is to be in charge of all security-related products that AtScale is pursuing.
How long have you been with AtScale?
A: I have been with AtScale for about a year and a half.
Prior to working at AtScale, you previously co-founded cloud security company, Threat Stack. Can you tell us more about that company and walk us through that experience? What led your interest in creating a security company?
A: Founding Threat Stack was a pretty fun learning experience for me. It was the first company that I’ve ever started. I co-founded it with Jen Andre. It was a company that was focused on cloud security investigations. Our technology was digging into system calls for particular Linux servers and using system call information to determine if there was a breach. I’ve always written open-source software for as long as I can remember, so I’ve been programming and writing open-source software and a lot of ideas come about from that. Jen and I had collaborated and came up with this idea to build a cloud-centered threat detection system which was really the first of its kind, Threat Stack really was the first cloud security company doing real digital forensics and incident response. It was mostly just good timing, or being at the right place at the right time.
In your opinion, what are companies doing wrong when securing their data?
A: The biggest problem right now is the amount of data that companies have. Keeping controls and restraints on that data, understanding how that data is being used and shared, understanding how to process that amount of data without leaking that information to the public or leaking it to insider threats; that’s the main focus. Data governance and compliance are really the two main focus areas for large companies at the moment. We need to look at how people access data, how people secure our data, and how we create audit trails for our data.
What are they doing right?
A: A lot of companies are moving to the cloud which makes things a lot easier. There’s standardization across cloud providers, AWS, and Google and Microsoft Azure does a really great job of making sure that there’s standardization for the base images that they use. It’s a lot easier to keep these types of things updated with security patches versus traditional data centers. Plus most of the cloud providers offer security logging, encryption at rest and other data governance and compliance tools. Migrating data and migrating machines and the powering of machines is much easier than traditional data centers. The result is cost reduction and systems that are easier to track, monitor, and remediate. I think what companies are doing right is that they are moving to the cloud and making their physical footprint much smaller, thus making the attack surface much smaller.
What should our customers expect to see from us this year?
A: What’s going to set AtScale apart is the data governance and compliance tools that we’re building into the product that allows a user to have fine-grain controls over which tables and columns users can view. We also have the ability to anonymize data by column and table around personal information including social security numbers, phone numbers, last name, first name; things like that. That’s being added to our technology and that’s what will set us apart in the market for sure.
If you weren’t working in this field, what other career do you think you would have?
A: Music. That’s what I do in my spare time. Music is my #1 hobby and would probably be my career if I wasn’t doing tech and startups. I work on the production side of music and produce Nineties-style hip hop beats for underground artists.
What’s an interesting fact about you that people might be surprised to learn?
A: I grew up in Russia. I went to a part of middle school and all of high school in Moscow. I couldn’t speak the language, so I spent a lot of time on the computer which got me more comfortable living there. That’s really where my love of computers came from. I don’t think that if I didn’t move to Russia, I would be into computers at all.
Thank you, Dustin!
Interested in meeting the rest of our team? Keep an eye out for our next employee spotlight, here on our blog!
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