In this conversation, Jeremy Snyder, the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup, shares his professional journey and perspectives. Specifically,
- How he got into IT in the late 90s, when technology was coming into businesses
- Early experience in Linux, VAX and Unix and implementing solutions for a translation agency
- Being responsible to evaluate, implement and integrate with various systems and thereby increasing the empathy for users and their situations
- Moving to work with one of the solution providers and taking up tech support roles and trying his hand at software development
- Getting into and liking the infrastructure related roles
- His experience, as an IT infrastructure professional, of working with software developers
- The ‘healthy’ struggle between the two roles and how IT teams would specify the environments to develop and deploy into
- IT teams wanting to conserve resources and giving very limited capacities for developers
- Days when 98% availability was taken as acceptable and when crashes occurred, devs and IT teams would work overtime to find fault with the other team
- Starting with Amazon AWS in 2010 when cloud computing was just evolving
- Understanding the power of virtualized environments and why that needs a different way of thinking about data centers, getting away from the server-hugger mentality
- The need for users to develop trust in the cloud model of working
- The experience with gaining customer confidence in the cloud model in terms of stability, security etc
- The harder aspect of addressing cultural issues triggered by fear of losing jobs by IT personnel
- Taking up other roles in smaller companies and understanding the security and vulnerability risks that companies could get exposed to
- Perimeter controls, endpoint protection, logging and monitoring etc
- From replicating data center structures to auto scaling infrastructure using containers and serverless architectures
- These resulting in more and more API based architectures
Social media: https://twitter.com/halffinn
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Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Jeremy was once kicked off a train in central Sweden, and another time went several days without seeing another human, but did see lots of reindeer.
- Link to my podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-ciso/id1596056884
