When CloudSphere’s new CEO Jane Gilson takes the reins of the multicloud management startup later this month, she’ll join the exclusive club of female tech CEOs and become the company’s first female chief executive.

Prior to joining CloudSphere, Gilson was Microsoft’s general manager of business strategy, and Google’s director of large customer sales for emerging markets where she grew Google’s multi-billion-dollar emerging market division more than 66%. She wants to grow CloudSphere at a similar, global scale.

In addition to meeting sales targets and market-share goals, however, diversity and inclusion play prominent roles in scaling CloudSphere’s business, Gilson said. “Diversity and inclusion is central to everything that we need to be able to do,” she said. “We need to represent the population at large.”

As a Microsoft executive in the Czech Republic, for example, she initiated a retention program for women to help them learn different skill sets and ways of negotiating and a female leadership forum called Opening Windows.

Diversity means being inclusive of gender and skin color, but also of different thoughts and approaches to problem solving, Gilson added. “I’m an English literature major, so I tend to look at problems differently than an engineer. You need all different kinds of people sitting around the table to come up with the best solution.”

And rightly or wrongly, she fields a version of the female CEO question far more often than her male counterparts. “I have to juggle balls just like everybody in between personal and professional, and sometimes I drop the ball,” Gilson said. “I think the most important thing is trying not to sweat the small stuff and keep the right things in perspective.”

IDC predicts spending on cloud services will surpass $1 trillion by 2024, and Gilson wants to make sure that CloudSphere gets a big piece of that pie. Gilson says she’s confident CloudSphere can win in the market because of its differentiated approach.

“I looked at the market opportunity, and then I looked at CloudSphere’s technology, and how it’s making it so simple and easy for an IT professional to manage multicloud environments,” she said. “That’s why I am so excited about this opportunity. In terms of the growth of the market, it’s huge, and the headache to the IT professional is only getting bigger.”

COVID-19, and the resulting mass migration to cloud-delivered software and services made that headache worse.

CloudSphere, Gilson said, is “the Excedrin to that headache.”

CloudSphere has headquarters in Los Altos, California, and Dublin, which is where Gilson is currently based. She’ll move back to the United States for the CEO position. The company got its start in June 2020 when HyperGrid, a cloud management and governance provider, merged with iQuate, an agentless discovery and application mapping company. The combined company provides cloud security posture management as well as cost management and cloud migration services. Its customers include enterprises and service providers such as IBM, Sky, SoftBank, DHL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Synopsys, and Telenor.

CloudSphere’s platform uses application discovery and dependency mapping to group cloud resources by application instead of by individual cloud resources. This application-centric view of cloud governance gives customers an easier way to plan cloud migrations and manage security and cloud costs, Gilson said.

“Eight-one percent of companies have multicloud environments, and all of their applications are running in these different environments,” she said. “So what CloudSphere does is provide you with simple tools.”

The platform provides cost management tools including real-time budget alerting. It also helps secure cloud environments with cloud identity and access management. “So it gives you those guardrails, and this is a huge help to the IT organization,” Gilson said.

CloudSphere counts cloud security posture management vendors CloudHealth (owned by VMware), DivvyCloud (recently acquired by Rapid7), and CloudCheckr as its primary competitors. The fact that two of these companies were acquired by larger vendors also signals the growing importance of posture management in the larger multicloud space.

Gilson said CloudSphere’s simplicity sets it apart from these competitors. “And the other thing we do really, really well is that we are able to group cloud resources by applications, which is something that nobody else does,” she added.

As she sets her sights on growing CloudSphere’s market share and global presence, Gilson said she will draw from lessons learned at Microsoft and Google.

“I have been able to work at name-brand companies like Microsoft and Google, and through that experience I learned firsthand how to scale a business,” she said. “And the simplest way to do that is to build the fundamentals into the business, making sure you have those simple processes so that you’re not recreating the wheel every time. When you’re in a startup environment, sometimes you’re running so quickly that you forget to take a pause and put those processes in place.”

Once the processes, or business fundamentals are in place, companies can build on top of them. “And that,” she added, “is where the acceleration comes in.”