Monica Jain, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LogicHub, won Security Champion of the Year at the Women in IT Awards USA.

Monica Jain is a cyber security entrepreneur, innovator and speaker who seeks to change the way companies think about information security. During her 18-year career, she has created new products at startups and managed established ones at large companies. She co-founded LogicHub in 2016 to help organisations stay ahead of emerging threats and solve complex security problems. LogicHub is a security intelligence automation platform that speeds the investigation of potential information security breaches and helps chief information and security officers sleep better.

Prior to LogicHub, Monica spent more than 10 years at cyber security firm ArcSight, where she helped the company grow from zero revenue to its $1.5 billion acquisition by Hewlett Packard. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.

1. Can you provide leadership advice for those looking to advance their careers?

Identify your passion and always pursue it. When you do, work becomes more fun and you are set up to excel. My passion has always been helping and interacting with customers around cyber security. After hundreds of conversations with customers, I was able to identify technology gaps in the security domain that evolved over the years and to create LogicHub in response.

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I’d suggest that those who want to advance should focus on results. Once you’ve identified your passion and mapped out your professional goals, it’s time for hard work and determination. There’s no substitute for that. Always ask yourself, “Was that the best I could do?” If the answer is anything but yes, put in extra work and effort to deliver great results. Results are what matters, everything else is a distraction.

2. Who have you looked to for inspiration?

I’ve been very fortunate to have fantastic mentors whom I’ve looked up to and learned immense amounts from. You learn from everyone around you, whether it’s your customers, peers or mentors. You should always be in learning mode. My parents have always been role models for me. Even today, I apply what I learned from them to my day-to-day work ethic. 

3. What was the best piece of advice given to you?

Never give up. Always keep trying and keep going with full dedication. Success will come. This was advice from my father who is one of my biggest role models.

4. Have you had to overcome any career challenges?

Yes, I believe everyone does. Nothing is as straightforward as we sometimes think. I ran into challenges at different times in my career and had to make tough decisions. The key is to calculate your risks in every situation, choose your actions with clear intentions and march towards your goals without getting distracted. In the end, overcoming those challenges is the most rewarding feeling.

5. Can you provide a prediction for the future about how the nature and source of cyber threats will change and how security will evolve to counter them?

I have been in this industry for 18 years and cyber attacks still go after the same thing – our data. Attacks are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect with the advancements in cloud adoption, blurry perimeter boundaries and the increasing volume of data. It’s taking our security teams longer to chase these attacks with the limited manpower we have available.

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Automation is essential to helping our security professionals counter these attacks more quickly. Thankfully, our industry has already started to focus on that. The volume of data that needs to be processed can be solved with machine-scale, but the key is to also leverage the human domain expertise and automate that.

6. Did you seek a career in tech or is it something that you came to indirectly?

I earned a master’s degree in computer science and had always been interested in analysing data. Shortly after graduation, I was introduced to a security company that was a pioneer in cyber security. During my time there, I fell in love with security specifically because it’s about aggregating, analysing and crunching data to find what really matters. This was where my security-focused career started. I’ve never left it and am still passionate about it today.

7. What does your typical day look like?

A: It varies but typically the first thing I do is plan my day early in the morning. Then I respond to customers and e-mails before spending time with my kids until they go to school. Once I get to the office, my day is busy with team meetings where we drive the product vision, customer meetings to provide support and collect feedback and work with the sales and marketing team to acquire new customers. In the evening, I always try to have dinner with my family and spend time with my kids before they go to bed. Later, I mostly catch up with what I didn’t get to that day and maybe listen to some music to relax.

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8. What aspect of cyber risk most often keeps you up at night?

The risk that someone could get into my customer’s critical data without the customer being aware of it. I want to figure out how can I surface these attacks up for my customers on time and help them sleep better. LogicHub is an attempt to get there by leveraging our customers’ expertise and force-multiplying it to detect these hidden attacks. 

9. What should everybody understand about cyber security?

Cyber security is extremely critical to our economy because a breach can bring down large businesses overnight or interfere with critical infrastructure and defense systems. Security is one industry where accuracy in identifying alerts is extremely important, but it takes time to be accurate. If you miss one critical thing, you can go out of business the next day. We all need to work together to effectively fight against cyber attacks and automation is the key to doing so.

Sourced by John Sparks, Contributing Editor