Before Tim Eades entered cybersecurity, he was a self-proclaimed “misfit with a mohawk” who forged his father’s signature to go to university. Years later, the vArmour CEO says the industry – filled with “misfits, builders, and scalers” – is as fun and challenging as ever. 

“You want to do this with a bunch of people that are focused on the same mission: to secure countries, to secure enterprises,” he said. “And what's real fun about it is when you do companies like this, you've got to come up with a macro idea and kind of go after it. You’ve got to be a little bit of a lunatic.”

While he still enjoys the daunting task of security, Eades said it’s also the hardest job around. “It's very thankless. The last few years in particular have been brutal,” he added. Along with a new set of security and networking challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive movement to cloud-based services. 

Eades said the pandemic provoked a new transformation in the security industry. 

“Our traditional customers like banks were quite skeptical about using the cloud prior to the pandemic,” he said. “They’ve all accelerated their adoption, which is great because then they can use our cloud platform and we get better insights and they get better value.”

The transformation the industry saw about 10 years ago, according to Eades, was a shift in focus toward application security, which was followed by heavy investment in workload security.

However, as applications get more distributed and run on public clouds, data security will be a primary concern in keeping them running. His prediction now is that proliferating cloud adoption will shift the industry's focus toward data security.

“The more data you get the more valuable you are to your customers,” Eades said. vArmour is now focused on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform the company calls the “relationship cloud,” which allows the company to consume data across all of its customers. 

Having that data in a cloud enables the ability to run artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which Eades said can offer “incredible insights.” 

“You can see unusual things, you can see some exciting things, you can find bad things,” he added. "That data is our investment to get it onto a cloud platform.” 

Since the pandemic's start, vArmour started a team in Calgary, Alberta, focused on AI and ML — skill sets Eades says are hard to come by. 

AI and ML are tools that will enhance modern cloud architecture and offer new agility and predictive capabilities to data security, Eades said.

“What's fascinating is your old legacy estate that you've had for 20 years or 30 years ago is not that digital, it's just static, and old, and sat around,” he added. “But on your modern cloud estate you can make it defensive and agile all at the same time, and you can do some really great stuff with AI and ML around that.”

In addition to speeding up digital transformation, the pandemic also brought a wave of stress-related mental-health concerns to the industry, Eades noted.

With more than two years of work-from-home and hybrid schedules gone by, many fear the “great burnout” has reached cybersecurity. A record number of workers quit their jobs during the pandemic, leaving security practitioners concerned about the mental health of their employees. 

“Everybody had some dark times, you know, being locked behind Zoom,” Eades said. His personal pandemic distraction, he added, was learning to speak Italian and gardening – planting 4,500 bulbs to be exact. 

To help lift morale, vArmour established “wellness days” — two free Fridays each month. Since then, 98% of vArmour employees reported that wellness days had a positive impact on their work life. While many use it to enjoy time with family and personal activities, it is also common for many to use a portion of the time for "catch up" work, resulting in a better work-life balance, vArmour reported. 

Sixty-seven percent of employees reported there is no benefit they would trade for wellness days off. vArmour said wellness days have attracted new talent, with many new hires reporting it was a deciding factor in their ultimate decision to go with the company. 

vArmour also sent painting kits to all of its employees and hired an instructor for virtual lessons. 

“It is one of the most engaging ways to get particularly engineers, software engineers, who normally have the Zoom cameras off, to turn them all on,” Eades said. “Then they all show [their paintings] to each other. It's just so much fun.”

The changes, he added, have been “exceptional from a morale perspective and an engagement perspective.”