Behind the Scenes with Palo Alto Networks CIO and CISO Securing Business Success with Frictionless Cybersecurity
Meerah Rajavel: AI is real. It's absolutely real, because we are seeing value already through that. We are seeing meaningful business impact, which we can quantify the outcomes that we are able to get. [ Music ]
David Moulton: Welcome to "Threat Vector," the Palo Alto Network's podcast where we discuss pressing cybersecurity threats and resilience, and uncover insights into the latest industry trends. I'm your host, David Moulton, Director of Thought Leadership for Unit 42. [ Music ] Today, I'm thrilled to introduce two exceptional leaders from Palo Alto Networks who are at the forefront of driving both technology and security strategies for our company. Meerah is an experienced technology executive with a passion for business outcomes. She's worked at top companies like Citrix, McAfee, and Cisco, where she championed digital transformation and diversity initiatives. Niall brings over 25 years of cybersecurity experience before joining Palo Alto Networks. Together, Meerah and Niall will discuss their unique partnership and how they balance innovation with security to drive growth. We'll explore their approach to incident response, how they leverage AI for productivity, and the importance of trust in cybersecurity. Meerah, Niall, welcome to Threat Vector.
Meerah Rajavel: It's really a pleasure to be here joining you, David, for the podcast and really looking forward to the discussion today.
Niall Browne: Thanks, David. We're looking forward to an interactive conversation, and I think it's going to be fun.
David Moulton: Beautiful. Could you start by telling me a little bit about your current role here at Palo Alto Networks?
Meerah Rajavel: So my role as a CIO in Palo Alto Network is really making sure we provide the right technology capabilities that can help the business to grow the top line and also help the business to manage the bottom line, which is how we bring efficiency and how we enable the business to be productive and also ensuring that all the employees have the right productivity. So every single employee, whether the person is a go-to-market person, whether the person is a finance person or an engineering leader, they have the full productivity. They can provide the best to Palo Alto and we need to do it all in a secure way. That's where I partner with Niall here, who's our CISO.
David Moulton: Can you tell us a little bit about your day and your role here at Palo?
Niall Browne: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So I joined Palo Alto about five years ago, and I'm responsible for cybersecurity at the company. So generally what that entails is like how do we secure our enterprise? How do we protect our basic products, and then how do we, obviously, make sure our customer data is secure itself. So that's very much working closely with the enterprise team and Meerah and working with the product team, ensuring that we've got a secure platform to provide, basically, the best platform in the world.
David Moulton: What roles were you in before you became the CIO here at Palo Alto Networks?
Meerah Rajavel: My journey is slightly a different journey from many of the traditional CIOs, David. I started my career as a software engineer in product organization, building products, even the very pre-dates of dot coms and the internet, and then really at a point in time after a decade or so, I felt like I want to be close to, you know, the customers that I'm building for, and I want more business interaction. But I didn't want to give up technology and it felt very natural. IT is a great place to be in. So I switched into IT and worked for many large technology companies because I also want to be the customer of the company's product, as well. But that's one thing I enjoy very much in Palo Alto because when I'm in Palo Alto, I'm also the first customer of Palo Alto, and we are actually design partners in many ways. I've been a CIO for Forcepoint, Citrix, and Click and also worked in the IT division in Cisco and McAfee as well. So I spent a little over 10 years in specifically cyber companies as well.
David Moulton: So it sounds like that background in software development and then being at some of these different companies prepared you for that dynamic and fast-paced environment that we have here at PAN when you're talking about impacting that top line and that bottom line. That's a really interesting career journey, not what I expected.
Meerah Rajavel: Never a dull moment.
David Moulton: Niall, what was your career path like before you were here with Palo Alto Networks?
Niall Browne: Sure. So we worked in cybersecurity I think for about 25 years. My first job at one of the largest banks was probably my most interesting job title-wise. It was webmaster, and ever since, title-wise, it's all been downhill to eventually become a CISO from there. So the webmaster was fascinating. It was back in the old days of having firewalls. There was no such thing about stateful inspection. This is pre-Narazuke when he reinvented the modern firewall. So it was very much on Linux systems and hacking away. So I did that for a number of years in cybersecurity. Fascinated with that field. After that, then I started moving into more information security, security architecture side of the house. And this time, I'm like five times CISO kind of a row. Last 15 years, it's been kind of CISO of cloud companies, and then before here, I was at a number of companies, including Workday as their chief security officer. So most of my focus is in relation to how do you build cybersecurity controls in cloud? How do you build them in scale? And then see, most importantly, how do you get the largest customers in the world to trust you with their most sensitive data? And that's a key component, certainly, of Meerah and my role itself. They need to trust us with their most sensitive data. They need to trust us to secure not only ourselves, but their entire platform across the board, and how can we articulate that to customers in a way whereby they can look at us and say, yes, you are the largest cybersecurity company in the world. You are the most trusted provider itself, and with that, they can leverage us for more and more services from there. So ensuring customers are aware of how we're doing that and how we sweat up countless nights basically to ensure that they remain safe and protected.
David Moulton: Now I think the basis of trust is to say what you're going to do and go do it, and we've got a good track record of that here in no small part because we're secure and because we're innovative as an organization. We're able to take our customers' most sensitive data and protect it. Meerah, let me take it over to you. Is there a project that you're really passionate about right now that you're leading or working on?
Meerah Rajavel: There are three areas the team is focused on. One, we are focused on how we are going to make our go-to-market engine much more agile. So we have built a foundation. Last 24 months, we have done some amazing work on fixing the plumbing, building the foundation that gives us the agility in the market. This year, we are focused on leveraging the power of that platform that we have built and really making sure that we are helping our sales and our deal desk and our go-to-market teams to construct. I mean, because as Palo Alto is transforming into more and more platform company, our goal is to make sure we put the deals in such a way that it is actually going to have the best benefit and best security outcomes for our customers. And we have to make it in such a way that our sales team will be able to do it in a succinct fashion and get it to our customers and we can turn around quickly. That's one leg. The second leg is once we make the sale, we also want to make sure the customers are able to get the full value of our product. So we are working very closely with both product and our customer success team on how we do provision of our products. So the moment we do, they have the full power in hand. And then how we are going to partner with them throughout the journey, not just in the deployment, but once we deploy and proactively able to, you know, look at any issues, that's where we bring our AI. We are marrying our AI Copilot into our customer success and our customer workflows to make sure that our tech support team is able to take full advantage of it. And we are seeing telemetry in such a way that we can proactively look at issues and we can do our MTTR in a much better way. We understand the health of our customers. We maximize the value of their investment with Palo Alto. That's the second pillar. The third pillar that my team is focused on is all around employee productivity and leveraging AI for different areas of focus. So it comes in three areas. One is employee productivity. We launched our Panda AI, which is actually a Copilot for every employee in the company. You have any questions, you have requests that needs to be done in an automated fashion. Someone requesting to change their benefit or someone requesting to change their password. Someone wants access to a new software. All of these are no human touch today. We have automated through with a Gen AI in the front end and then using our own product XOR in the back for automating a lot of these workflows. The second area is we are trying to put the information in the hands of the salespeople, and we are in the very early stages of that, and this year we are expecting that to scale for the entire sales organization. So they have information at fingertip, whether it is about, you know, selling, whether it is about running a POC, RFP, our own product, competitive analysis. All of that should be information at fingertip. Last but not least, we are a software company. We manufacture software. So in R&D and IT together, we have over 6,000 engineers including support. If I can increase developer productivity, leveraging AI, code generation and whatnot, that's actually the third area. So those are the three major pillars that we are going through.
David Moulton: So Niall, Meerah just talked about the three key pillars that she's passionate about, the things that help our business be an awesome business. As the CISO, you're looking at that, how do you make sure that your teams and Meerah's teams are able to work together successfully here at Palo Alto Networks?
Niall Browne: If I think about it from a cybersecurity perspective, a few things that come to mind. So one is scale. So at Palo Alto Networks, it's a tremendous scale. There are hundreds of products being delivered by tens of thousands of engineers on diverse basic cloud platforms all over the world itself. And really, it's how do you embed security in every single core concept of that? Because it's easy to protect one computer, but if you have to protect hundreds of millions of cloud assets 24/7 across an infrastructure, it's a whole new set of cloud security constructs you need to build. So I think for that team, for that, that's a fascinating conversation with Seth and Meerah have on an ongoing basis. I think, too, it's the concept of frictionless. So if you make cybersecurity difficult, people shall not come. Or if they do come, they'll leave pretty quickly from there. So how do we bake the model whereby, if I'm a developer and I want to ship code basically once every three months, or once every month, or once every minute from a cybersecurity perspective, we don't care. It's embedded. It's frictionless itself. The cybersecurity operates in an underlying layer whereby there isn't a set of bureaucracy and red tapes either for approving a vendor, onboarding a staff member, or deploying a new software pipeline itself. It should be seamless from there. It's really the core concept of, you know, if we do it, others can just as easy do it itself because we leverage our three platforms every single day within Palo Alto Networks to protect ourselves. With that, we built up a substantial body of knowledge in relation to how do we secure, protect, and configure it and do it in operational capacity? So one simple example is by we moved from the legacy SIM environment to an XSIAM, which is our new environment for managing our SIM, and from that perspective, we automatically saved about 75 FTEs by automation every single year. So now instead of a SOC team of 15 people, you add 75 on automation, you have a team of 90 SOC analysts basing, frankly, you're only paying for about 14. So that's tremendously beneficial itself. So that's just one of dozens, if not hundreds of stories both Meerah and I share with customers on a daily basis. How do you scale, and most beneficially, how do they do it in a manner whereby they can be as efficient as possible while at the same time itself providing true value? And I think it's always the case that it's like, if you look at, customers always ask, well, who else has done that? If you can share examples of how it's being done, and I think it's really important to share the warts and all. This worked really well, two steps forward and three steps back. Here's where we had problems and how we course corrected. That in itself, I think for customers is tremendously beneficial. They don't want to hear success stories and rightly so. They want to hear the warts and all, and I think it's a really interesting challenge, and it's a really good opportunity to speak with some of the largest organizations in the world on an ongoing basis about how do you truly deliver IT and InfoSec. [ Music ]
David Moulton: Tell me your favorite frictionless piece of security here.
Niall Browne: Yeah, I mean, I think one example is that one of the projects we rolled out over the last kind of two -- probably two years from there. So it was the concept of shift-left, shift-right. Shift-right, a problem exists, you chase it down, you ask people to fix it. Shift-left, you get as close as possible to the developer. In the past, as with most organizations, we had more of a shift-right mantra. We would find a problem, chase it down, get them to fix it from there. Terrible model, doesn't scale. You're trying to find somebody at that point, they've left the company itself or they're working on other priorities. So we said, there has to be a better way of doing this.. So -- and people didn't appreciate us chasing them down in the water cooler every day as well. So eventually they would stay away from that water cooler, and we had to move on to another one. So shift left, get as close as possible to the developer. We simply set up a set of guardrails, be it basically for implementing secrets and code, infrastructure to code, third-party code, our code. Shift left, guardrails themselves, whereby the developer, once they stayed within those guardrails, they could ship whenever they want, 24/7, once they met those guardrails. From our side, we were delighted. Security is much more secure. We found that we were 92% more efficient over a period of a year. So imagine I could go to you, David, and say, hey, I can make you 10% more efficient. You're like, wow, that's pretty cool. I can make you 50% more efficient. Whoa, 100%. Imagine what one can do, what two people do. By simply doing shift-left, 92% more efficient across the company from an engineering perspective. That's one simple example of the construct of shift right to shift left, and then what you can achieve using that story, and again, for that one, we made 100 decisions, and we made decisions that were right. We made decisions that were wrong, and so as we make wrong ones, we pivoted pretty quickly, and we made it better and better. And that's why I think, you know, to your point, the authenticity of what didn't work from there. And also, even now, what's working, what's not working. It's a fascinating conversation that Meerah and I have with customers on an ongoing basis, whereby it's really kind of them that kind of chat the rules of what happens underneath that, behind that, the wizard's curtain.
Meerah Rajavel: Yeah. Pinging is very important, right, David? Because in my charter, absolutely, is employee productivity and frictionless is a top, top thing. And nice, top thing is security. It's not either or. It is actually, they are two sides of the same coin. You have to have an integrated thinking on how you're going to deliver. Very similar thing we did. We said MFA on everything. You're not going to do MFA on everything if you don't have a password list. So my challenge to the team is get rid of passwords, then we can do MFA on everything. So today we are passwordless. People don't even recognize that we are doing a multi-factor authentication on every single thing. Most of the companies I talk to constantly ask, how did you guys get there? How are you able to get your employees to do that, right? I mean, we have multiple stories where we have tripped and learned, but it is very similar. And I have very similar stories most of the time.
David Moulton: What I'm hearing about this conversation is it's people again, and there isn't a point when you ship security and you're done, you ship IT and you're done. Ask a lot of questions, make a lot of decisions, get to a point, is it still working? Does it make sense? And to have that dynamic ability to go back and forth between the IT strategy and the security strategy or the principles and allow it to build where the company needs to go. Mira, let me ask the question though, specifically, how do you align your IT strategy to work with the security needs that Niall does have?
Meerah Rajavel: I'll pick on what Niall said a little bit of shift-left/right. Because security, I call it, there are two analogies I use when it comes to security. One is the analogy of oil, the other is an analogy of a brake in the car. For me, the analogy of oil in cooking is like you can't cook the food and then put oil on top of it to say I'm greasing it now. It has to be cooked from the get-go. Security is the same way. If you're designing a product, if you're designing an application, if you're pulling a report for your customers, you have to think about security from the get-go. It has to be integrated into the architecture. It has to be integrated in the design. So my team actually upfront, if you're buying a third-party software, the first thing that gets pulled in is InfoSec team. They'll get pulled in to make sure that it is secure, and we are not investing a penny of our energy on it until we are aligning very upfront. Same thing, when we are building a product, we are actually aligning with Niall's team from our high-level architecture onwards to make sure all the security controls are baked in because if I build a product and try to make it secure, it's much more harder. The other analogy I was mentioning was a brake, right? You mentioned about agility. You mentioned about how we are able to pivot and we as an industry go fast. So it's like you can look at a brake in the car as a friction, or if you really want to go fast, you really want a strong brake. So you can apply the brake when you need to stop and you need that friction, which is a healthy friction at the right point in time, which means we need to have really high control and high visibility and ability to act quickly, not relying on humans. Like for example, the entire network security, I can change the password on my 3,000 firewalls with the click of a button or even better, it can be automated through a playbook as well, right? So that's the kind of strong security controls you need if you want to go fast.
David Moulton: Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about incident response and how, in an event of a major security incident, Meerah, what kind of role do you play here to ensure that the IT systems at Palo remain really resilient and up?
Meerah Rajavel: When it comes to incident response, there is preventive, proactive, business continuity thinking, and then there is actually managing the incident itself. So being prepared is where my team invests a lot of time, right, whether it comes in the form of having the right kind of resilience, having the right form of failovers, and having the right form of data that we have the ability to pull from backups, et cetera, and having the right way of segregation, zero trust becomes very important. These are all preparedness towards preventing incidents, and we play a significant role in making sure that we are prepared, we are preventing, and we are proactive. If the incident did indeed happen, then we need a clear driver. You need someone who's clearly accountable. It cannot be too many cooks in the kitchen. If there's a real incident, that's when we expect Niall and team, and they are actually -- we will leave in their hands to lead the incident management, and we play a strong partner and support role. Whatever data they need, whatever actions that need to be required, right? I mean, depending on the severity of the incident, the quicker response, and the ability to support them with anything that's required, and also protecting our customers and business becomes equally important, right? So we shift from being a driver and builder quickly into a response team that's actually leading, and we will become the supporting party and partner for them in making sure that's getting resolved.
David Moulton: Well, Niall, let me kick it over to you. Can you walk through how the team collaborates with Meerah during an incident, and particularly, like, where do you lean on her for the technical aspects of the response?
Niall Browne: So I think incidents are the lifeblood of any company. Incidents will happen. Invariably, they'll happen at like, you know, 4:45 p.m. on Friday, just when you're going out the door itself, and it's always the chaos, and then it's interesting. People go home for the weekends, do whatever they want sort of thing, come back, plug in on Monday morning, and suddenly, it lights up without a doubt across the network. You're like, oh my god, this is fun. So, incidents do happen, will happen, always happen. So for us, it's like, how do we manage it in an operational way? Going back to my earlier example of development, shift, left, break, build, 92% efficiency, the way you get that is you grind it down itself. You define, like, what's the best practice? How do you operationalize that? And you push it across the network. The same thing with incidents. There's an awful lot of lessons learned that can be learned from there. So what we have is as soon as an incident comes in, it's similarly like a homicide itself. You have a detective that catches that incident. So you have somebody either in the SOC or incident command that will take that incident, and they'll run that incident from end to end, and the first thing they do is they get in a room itself, because communication is critically important from there. Secondly, they'll bring up the war room. Everyone's in the war room, and they start bringing up to -- invariably, the team we reach out to significantly would be Meerah and our team itself, because it's generally like end users doing something from there. So, we'll be pulling systems, laptops, images, forensics. We'll be running IOCs, and at this point, I think, you know, we have, for I think the vast majority of incidents, we'll have a playbook, and we're in the next playbook, the next playbook, the next playbook. But everyone's staying on that line. We're in a war room. Everyone's in the comms from there. There's clear communication back and forward. We're sharing kind of action plans. And with that model, we can either look at an incident very, very quickly and say, forget about this. We can ignore this one. Two, it looks at the point whereby it's a significant one, and we need to do some further analysis. And three, there's always ones whereby it flips into cyber resilience mode itself. And cyber resilience is critical, because, you know, as they say, cyber security is interesting. But as Mike Tyson said, like, you know, everyone's got to plan until they get punched, and the same thing in cybersecurity. We will get punched, and with that, it comes back to cyber resilience. So if they get into, let's say, like a sales environment from there, how quickly can they get in and sit from there? Can they move laterally? Can we keep the containment in that environment? Is there the concept of zero trust? Is there the concept of least privilege? All of those apply across the board. And if you do a really good job of cyber resilience, cyber security naturally becomes much easier over time. Because when the incident happens, cyber resilience on the shift-left side has already occurred, and they're constrained within that environment. So I think the most important thing is operationalizing it, having a set of playbooks, and making sure the right people, including kind of enterprise, are in the room, and running the incident from end to end across the board. And then different threats come up at different times. Sometimes you think your playbooks, they're fully sufficient. And oftentimes, you're looking like, well, we missed X, Y, Z. And again, going back to your earlier point, that's an opportunity to go back and say, well, we're missing a key step as part of our cyber resilience plan. Let's rev that, rev that, rev that. So the program you generally see on a Monday in cybersecurity is different to the model you generally see on a Friday in cybersecurity, because it's a continuous matter of evolution. What's working? Go with it. If it's not working, shift it, change it, pivot, and then operationalize it across the platform. [ Music ]
David Moulton: Now with all the constant new threats, how do you ensure that the team here at Palo Alto Network stays ahead of the curve in terms of both security technologies and skills?
Niall Browne: First of all, it kind of partnering closely with enterprise. Two, it's partnering with Wendy Whitmore in Unit 42. I think, Meerah, you've got a Unit 42 mug over there that I saw earlier on.
David Moulton: Yeah. Those of you who can't see us on the podcast, she's got her Don't Panic mug.
Niall Browne: I love Unit 42. Thanks. I'm very sure it's already on today, so I think it's cool. So yeah, so we work closely with the -- basically on Unit 42. Generally, they see, like for most, Palo Alto Network generally gets to see things before the vast majority of our organizations out there. Certainly, Wendy and the Unit 42 team, they get called into multiple different incidents. If we see something externally that's interesting, we'll generally ping them and say, oh, by the way, for such and such a threat actor, can you tell me who they are? What's their motivation? What's their IOCs, and we'll partner with that back and forth. So I think the great thing about working in Palo Alto is one is we've got a really good team. They see we've got a really good platform. Both Meerah and I can leverage Unit 42 for threat intel itself when we need them in some of those incidents.
David Moulton: Meerah, I'm sure there's times when you and Niall will have disagreements on how to risk. Walk us through that process of discussing the risk and figuring out where to take a risk and where to back off, and how do you mitigate those sorts of things?
Meerah Rajavel: So David, when you talk about, you know, I mean, I call it the business outcomes and security sometimes is a healthy friction that you need to talk through. It's, to me, always it's the way we need to resolve it is in the how, not the what. I always tell my team, it's not an option to say no to a security control that we need. I want to go fast, so I can't cut down on my brake. I just need to figure out how I'm going to get that brake, the strength I need, and that may be the place that we get into the friction. So I always tell my team, ask for the what, don't get hung up on the how. We have smart people around. When you put them together, they'll figure out the how. It's rather a matter of figuring out the how together, not compromising on the what of the security.
David Moulton: Niall, when you're thinking about those risk conversations, how do you coach your team to go in and not necessarily be prescriptive of you have to use this control, but we have to get to this outcome?
Niall Browne: Yeah, good question. I think for the most part, I'm very execution driven. When I look at this, it's generally like, what's the set of priorities we have? Like, A, what's the business value? What's the set of priorities against those? And then for those set of priorities, which of those requires a significant amount of resources? So there's no point in saying, hey, there's a large project we want to do, and we want it all done in Q1. That's not going to work from there. Many of them are multi kind of year and multi-threaded projects. So for each of those, it's really like, what phase are we in that project? Are we in the inception mode? Are we in documentation? Are we in the sign-off mode? Which part of the phases are we at? And then working closely on the team to align in relation to, what do we do? What do we build? What do we get across the road in Q1? What do we get across the road in Q2? What do we get across the road in Q3? That's critically important. Firmly, believe once the plan is locked and loaded, it's locked and loaded. After that, then it's execution, execution, execution. And with that, I think it's critically important to understand probably two things. One is that there's normal projects in the normal course of the business that you need to insert. And then two, what will happen is naturally over time, kind of going back to incidents and issues, every company will have an incident or an issue. And then with that, they'll say, oh, by the way, we have 32 controls that worked. And we have two controls that didn't work, basically. We need to implement those. So I think for the most part, it's that healthy conversation of what's the business value? What's the prioritization? How much resources is it going to require? And then if a team can get generally aligned on that, after that, then I find it's a pretty smooth process from there.
David Moulton: Based on trusting conversations and transparency, reminds me of a good marriage. Let's look to the future a little bit. Meerah, I want to give it over to you. You've come through this software developer into CIO on a winding path. What do you expect is the CIO role over the next five to 10 years, especially as security has become or is becoming more integral to IT?
Meerah Rajavel: I think, David, when we talk about what is going to be, you know, technology is ever changing. The one thing that's constant for the CIO is not getting married to the technology, but really very laser-focused on the business outcomes. Don't get me wrong. At the end of the day, you know, IT and CIOs, we are unique. USD is bringing technology to solve the problem for the business. It's a means to the end. It is not the end, right? And security is, to me, part of that. We still need to achieve the outcomes the business needs to achieve. And it could be a top line growth. It could be a bottom-line saving. It could be the risk reduction. This is where security comes into a huge picture. But all of this comes into the way of like, what is the outcome? So I look at this today. We have gone into cloud. We have gone into automation. Tomorrow we are going to do a lot of AI. AI is real. It's not a hype anymore. It's absolutely real because we are seeing value already through that. We are seeing meaningful business impact, which we can quantify the outcomes that we are able to get. So I see this. The role of CIO is going to become much more integrated into business, much more integrated into security, and becoming really the business leaders who bring technology as the USD to the table, but laser focused on driving outcomes.
David Moulton: So if you've got a listener out there who's thinking, someday I want to be like Meerah. I want to be a CIO. Are there skills or experiences or focus areas that they should be thinking about and working on today?
Meerah Rajavel: I think there are three pillars to it, David. Anybody who wants to be, like, goes back to what I said, who wants to sit in the role of a CIO, you need to know the industry and the business domain that you operate in. So you need to be a good business leader. You need to be a good technology leader as well. You need to have some level of tech depth, right? You cannot be someone who can say, my team will do technology, and I'm just going to be a business person. Or you cannot be a person saying, I'm a geek, somebody else will do the business. And then you also need to understand and you also need to be enough knowledgeable and enough expertise in security as well, because it has to be integrated. For me and Niall to have a healthy debate, we have to understand empathetically from each other's point of view. So if I don't understand what is the security controls he needs to solve -- I mean, I spent 10 years in the security industry. So when Niall comes with certain controls, it's very easy for me to understand so those are the three pillars, your business domain, your technical domain, your security domain.
David Moulton: One of the questions I love to ask any guest that comes on here, and I'll ask you both to answer this one, is what's the most important thing that the listener take away from today's conversation? And Meerah, let me kick that to you first.
Meerah Rajavel: I think for me, the most important thing is don't look at IT and security as two different organizations, certain industries for segregation of duty, they have to keep it separate, right? My point is, it doesn't matter. Don't let the organizational divide get in the way of how you need to drive the outcomes. You have to think security integrated from a user experience point of view. You have to think about security integrated from a product development point of view. Your CISO is your partner. In today's world, the adversaries are getting smarter and smarter. AI is not going to make it easier. Things are going to go faster. So you absolutely need to be prepared for it.
Niall Browne: Niall, let me kick it over to you. What is the number-one thing that you want to take away from this conversation today? I'll say two things. One is organization alignment is critically important. At Palo Alto, we're an engineering house itself, very product-orientated. So having security part of engineering and product just makes a no-fail sense because we're as close to the business as possible. And then two, I think for the most part, it's talk is cheap at the end of the day. Execution wins every single time. So how can you build a model whereby you're continuously driving change across the organization? So this is the strategy we want to build. Here's a set of controls we want to build, test it in a small population, find out 50% of what I thought about works, 50% doesn't work. Pivot from there, build it, scale it from there. That's what makes a CISO job super interesting and super exciting. So I think certainly the role of the CIO and the CISO is going to be increasingly challenging and exciting for both Meerah and I. [ Music ]
David Moulton: Meerah, Niall, the big takeaway I have is that IT and security are the cookies and cream of the business. Amazing when they're together. I appreciate you coming on "Threat Vector" today and having this great conversation with me.
Meerah Rajavel: Thank you, David. [ Music ]
David Moulton: Well, that brings us to the end of the episode. Today's conversation with Meerah and Niall gave us a deep insight into what it takes to align IT and security at an enterprise level, and more importantly, how this partnership drives real business outcomes. One of the key themes that stood out to me was the idea that security isn't just a safety net. It's an enabler for agility and growth. As Meerah said, security is like the brakes in a car. You can't go fast without them. Strong security allows organizations to move faster, innovate with competence, and focus on delivering value to customers. I also appreciated Niall's focus on frictionless building security directly into workflows so that becomes invisible. It's a powerful reminder that security doesn't have to slow us down if it's designed thoughtfully. That's a lesson every organization can take away. Ultimately, today's discussion highlighted a crucial point. IT and security are not separate functions. They are two sides of the same coin. Trust is at the center of everything, whether it's trusting your internal teams, your security systems, or ensuring your customers trust you with their data. And as we heard from both Meerah and Niall, building trust requires communication, collaboration, and a shared commitment to business outcomes. That's it for today. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your reviews and feedback really do help us understand what you want to hear about. If you want to reach out to me directly about the show, email me at threatvector @paloaltonetworks.com. I want to thank our executive producer, Michael Heller, our content and production teams, which include Kenna Miller, Joe Bettencourt, and Virginia Tran. Elliot Peltzman edits the show and mixes the audio. We'll be back next week. Until then, stay secure. Stay vigilant. Goodbye for now. [ Music ].
