CyberWire Daily - Peter Baumann: Adding value to data. [CEO] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: July 18, 2021

CEO of ActiveNav, Peter Baumann, takes us on his career journey from minor home electrical experiments to the business of data discovery. He began his career as an electrical engineer, but felt an entrepreneurial spirit was part of his makeup. Following his return to college to study business and finance, Peter talks about being set on the path to shine the light on the data to provide discovery capability. To those interested in the field, he suggests having a broad familiarity of different approaches. We thank Peter for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hello, my name is Peter Bauman, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the company ActiveNav. I think my earliest ambition or career path was probably when I was about seven or eight. And I showed a keen interest in doing wiring. I was always building kind of lighting circuits.

I was putting lights and buzzers into models. circuits. I was putting lights and buzzers into models and I was kind of putting tripwires over my sister's bedrooms which would send off lights and buzzers so we all knew where they were. That kind of morphed into an interest in electrical engineering and not least in the world of theatre. I used to be fascinated when you would go to the theatre and looking at all the lights. I think I wanted to be a lighting engineer. Surprisingly, that's probably the last time I really had a clear focus on what my career was. I went to something that's known as an industrial sandwich course in electrical engineering. It was actually electronics and communications.

When I came out of that, I worked for four years or so. I traveled a lot. I enjoyed it, but I kind of realized it wasn't really for me. It wasn't what I wanted to do. So in my early 20s, I went back to college and I took a more conventional course, if you like, in business and finance. And then that took me on my career that I've been on since or at least my path. I've always been quite entrepreneurial so through the whole journey there's been pockets of either independent entrepreneurship where I've set things up myself,

through to entrepreneurship within large organizations. And it's only in recent years that I've realized that that is just part of my makeup. My first real engagement coming back out of college was with what's now known as a startup. At the time, we were the first organization to provide financial and company financials and data on CD-ROMs, which were a completely new thing back then.

And so I kind of managed to leverage my interest in the business community, financial service world, with my background in early computers. But that was my first foray into a mixture of adding value to data to turn it into information. One of the things that's been common on the journey is the value of data. And if you do a good job of aggregating that data, you can clean it and you can score it, which then gives you information which itself has inherent value in it. One of the things that kind of attracted me to some of the work that was going on

originally at Southampton University and an early version of ActiveNav was this ability to look at large quantities of unstructured data with no prior knowledge of what was in that data or that information. We started to shine a light on the data to provide this discovery capability, the workflow to remediation on unstructured digital data. And that's what we did. And that's the journey we've been on since. The real challenge is what you do with all this information that's coming back at you. It's not getting hold of the data that matters so much. It's what you do with it.

The risk that you're carrying is significant. And that's where the whole cyber to privacy play comes in. And having that data out there, maybe hosted in somebody else's environment, but not knowing what it is and essentially waiting for the day that it may be breached is a very, very real risk. I like the people around me to take ownership, control their own destinies. I don't think they need me or any other kind of executive really to be there telling them what to do on a daily, daily basis. And so it's one of empowerment. It's one of fairness and building the right culture where people are comfortable. They can share challenges

and problems. And I'd like to say safe to fail. And that's hard. I think those cultures are driven very much from the top down. This is a growth market. It's not going away any time soon. I think there's decades of work to be done. I think we're only at the start of really dealing with this challenge. For newcomers, I think you want to keep a very open mind. You want to understand those different facets and so understand why intruders are trying to get into people's networks. If you can have a technical awareness, if you have a feel for the technologies, how they work, if you have a feel for why

organizations care, and then you have a broad familiarity of all the different approaches, solutions, architectures out there, I think you could be setting yourself up for a really exciting career. Ultimately, cyber matters because of the data we and organizations hold. And that is, for me, the final frontier to provide the protection, the security, and the peace of mind that we all desire. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home?

Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives and their families 24-7, 365 with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io.