Cisco shook up its leadership this morning with an announcement that its current security chief Gee Rittenhouse will leave, and Shaila Shankar, who heads the cloud and network security team, will take over the company’s $3.3 billion business unit.

Jeetu Patel, Cisco EVP for security and collaboration, announced the changes in an email to employees this morning. “First, Gee Rittenhouse has decided to leave Cisco,” Patel wrote.

Rittenhouse came to Cisco in 2014 after being recruited by then-CEO John Chambers to help shape the company’s cloud and virtualization strategy. He was appointed SVP and GM of the Security Business Group in 2018 where he spearheaded the vendor’s first security platform, SecureX. The product now has 8,000 customers, according to Cisco.

Patel’s email doesn’t give any additional details about Rittenhouse’s decision to leave the company, but says he is “committed to a successful transition” and agreed to stay on for several months.

Shaila Shankar, Cisco’s SVP and GM of cloud and network security, will assume Rittenhouse’s former role “effective immediately,” Patel wrote.

“Her background in cloud security combined with her deep expertise in building and designing products makes her the perfect leader to take our business to the next level as we transform security industry wide,” he added. “We are thrilled that Shaila will be the first woman to run Cisco’s security business in an industry that needs far more talent like her.”

Security lags behind the larger technology sector in terms of female leadership. Only about 5% of cybersecurity companies are led by women. With this move, however, two of the largest global security businesses are now run by women. In addition to Cisco’s Shankar, Ann Johnson is corporate VP of Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions Group.

Prior to Cisco, Shankar was SVP of engineering and enterprise at McAfee where she was responsible for its security and threat defense products, including endpoint, extended detection and response, data center security, and cloud-native application protection.

Also in his email, Patel said the company promoted Al Huger to SVP and GM for security platform and response.