Andy Reed
Cloud computing has reached a flash point, picked up and picked apart by powerhouse tech companies from Amazon to Microsoft to Google. Applying cloud computing to the public sector, however, is a different beast altogether. To discuss the methodology of how to bring the cloud to market, ExecutiveBiz reached out to Wayne Lewandowski, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HyTrust’s North America Public Sector. With a demonstrated track record working alongside technology manufacturers and channel partners, Lewandowski is the ideal sales professional, experienced in defining and executing new markets, sales team mentoring and growth, as well as technology marketing and positioning.
“…irrespective of public sector or commercial verticals, the needs of securing a multi-cloud environment will only be heightened over the next few years.”
EM: Being fairly new (six months) to your role as Senior Vice President & General Manager North American Public Sector at HyTrust, what are your responsibilities?
Wayne Lewandowski:Â I am responsible for leading our Public Sector business (U.S. Government, SLED, Tribal Nations, and Canadian Government) to penetrate the market with our platform of technologies. This includes working with my peers on the executive team to set a localized marketing message and strategy, align partners, and sales execution towards our corporate objectives.
What is the “HyTrust approach†to identifying, classifying, and protecting critical Cloud workload and data?
Our approach is to protect and secure the virtual workload that runs in your data center and cloud. This includes several major areas: discovery of data that should be protected but has not been identified, reducing risk through a least privilege model for the administrators of the virtual infrastructure (SDN/hypervisor/data at rest), and securing data through an enterprise encryption and key management solution. Just as importantly, we automate compliance of key requirements facing our government customers. This includes NIST standards, DISA STIGS, CJIS, and FedRAMP. With our Security Policy Framework, users will find a way to reduce privileged user threats, secure critical data, and minimize the cost of adhering to compliance standards.
HyTrust raised approximately $36 million in an E Round this summer. Additionally, HyTrust acquired DataGravity this summer. How does the merger of DataGravity– known for data visibility and security—enhance HyTrust’s solutions to the public sector?
This was a very strategic acquisition for the company. By acquiring Data Gravity (rebranded as Cloud Advisor), we now can now identify critical data that may have not been known, ensure that anomalous user behavior is identified, and gain insight to data that is utilizing scarce resources. As an integrated offer to the overall solution, we can ensure data is identified and put into a compliant and secure infrastructure automatically. This is a growing concern for many customers who know what they want to secure, but in many cases, are not sure that they have identified all of the assets.
What are some of the top challenges you see federal CIO’s facing when migrating over to the cloud?
There are a multitude of concerns from critical changes to applications to how the environment is protected. Most importantly ensuring they have a macro view of the enterprise that includes resources that are completely under their control in a data center or tactical deployment, to IaaS/SaaS/PaaS environments where the scope of their responsibility is reduced.
A concern that will continue to persist for the average CIO is a question like: how do I ensure I have protected my data and ensure the environment has high availability and resilience to a cyber threat? Without reducing the unfettered access to the virtual admins, these CIOs will continue to experience broad exposure to cyber threats. This includes the deletion of production workload and spillage of sensitive and classified data. Without an approach that involves such capabilities, it will be a daunting task to ensure they are protected and have a defined and defendable approach to their cyber posture.
As an experienced executive in defining and executing new markets, what new market opportunities do you see for HyTrust?
The opportunity for HyTrust is quite broad across our markets. I believe irrespective of public sector or commercial verticals, the needs of securing a multi-cloud environment will only be heightened over the next few years. Customers will continue to be faced with how can they adhere to an ever-increasing need to secure critical infrastructure and data while leveraging cloud assets. Our combined platform answers these issues and will continue to create a bright future.
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Wayne Lewandowski has been Senior Vice President and General Manager of North American Public Sector at HyTrust, Inc. since June 28, 2017. Lewandowski joined HyTrust from Thales e-Security, where he was Vice President of Sales to the U.S. Government and led the growth of cybersecurity platform technology in support of federal mandates. He served as an Area Vice President of Federal at Vormetric, Inc. He also spearheaded the expansion of Vormetric’s presence in the U.S. federal market across the intelligence community, DOD and civilian accounts. His background additionally includes senior federal sales positions at VMware, Plan B Government Systems, SAS and Interwoven.
