Melinda Marks
Senior Analyst Melinda Marks covers application and cloud security at ESG, helping organizations scale safely while adopting faster cloud-native development cycles. Her coverage area includes cloud-native application protection platforms, cloud workload protection, cloud security posture management, DevSecOps, and application security, including web application security testing (SAST, DAST, IAST, SCA) and API security.
With more than 20 years of experience in tech marketing and strategy, Melinda is passionate about conveying product value and differentiation and driving revenue. Most recently, she was chief marketing and strategy officer for Soluble, a startup focused on automating application security testing for developers. She was also VP of Marketing at Armorblox, VP of Marketing at Styra, and head of marketing for StackRox (acquired by Red Hat). Her experience includes running competitive/market intelligence and product marketing teams at Tenable and running global communications for four years at Qualys. She also spent many years at VMware, where she built its original customer reference program, led product PR, and was on the core VMworld planning team since the first VMworld.
Melinda is a Synopsys Outreach Foundation board member. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from U.C. Berkeley.
Organizations are increasingly moving applications to the cloud to better serve their customers, partners, and employees. The ability to quickly deploy applications to the cloud so employees, partners, and customers can connect to companies for business transactions and services gives organizations a competitive advantage. This makes maintaining security posture more important than ever, as increasing the availability of products and services connected to company and customer data increases exposure to attacks. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is key to mitigating security risk while enabling the use of innovative cloud technologies that drive better business results.
This episode of Women in Cybersecurity features Wendy Thomas, President and CEO of Secureworks, a leading cybersecurity company that helps its global customers build effective cybersecurity programs with innovative technology and professional services. With a mathematical background in economics and finance, she found that the field of cybersecurity provides a rewarding trifecta: the opportunity to work globally across cultures and geographies, intellectually stimulating work using innovative technology; and the ability to make a positive impact.
Her leadership includes diversity and inclusion initiatives to reflect the global markets Secureworks serves, and she is an advocate for childhood cyber literacy, starting as early as elementary schools.
Don't miss her video below, and be sure to check out the full audio interview.
My colleague John Grady completed a new research report on Trends in Modern Application Protection. It covers how organizations are modernizing their application architectures and the challenges they are seeing in web application and API protection platforms. In this video, we discuss some of his findings on API security. Watch the video below to learn about:
- The growth of APIs
- Challenges and methods to secure them
- API incidents that organizations have experienced and their impacts
- Methods of remediating API coding errors and their effectiveness
- What to look for in an API protection platform
This episode of Women in Cybersecurity features my dear friend, Laurie Haley, VP of Strategic Alliances at application security company
Veracode
. I
first met Laurie when we worked together at Qualys, where she was a superstar sales leader who had a technical background. She got her start in tech support, moving into network engineering, and then into cybersecurity roles at VeriSign and SecureWorks. Then she worked at CVS doing vulnerability management before moving to Qualys, where she spent nearly nine years, including serving as Executive VP of Worldwide Field Operations. Now she heads up strategic alliances for Veracode. With her technical background and her understanding of customer needs, she is passionate about helping them solve their biggest cybersecurity challenges with effective solutions.
Don't miss her video below, and be sure to check out the full audio interview.
This episode of Women in Cybersecurity features Arti Raman, the founder and CEO of Titaniam, an innovative data security company that helps organization protect their data even if they have been infiltrated.
Arti didn't start out in cybersecurity; her education was in economics and math, but when she worked at Agiliance in the area of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) 12 years ago, she was drawn to solving security problems and decided to put her analytical background to use to solve challenging security problems. She then worked at Symantec, where she tackled enterprise cybersecurity challenges, such as data center security and isolating workloads. Today, she leads her own company, drawing from her past experience of running another successful startup before she got into cybersecurity. Don't miss her video below, and be sure to check out the full audio interview.
This episode of Women in Cybersecurity showcases Brittany Greenfield, the founder and CEO of Wabbi. While Brittany started her career with a degree in biotechnology, working in business process and marketing roles, she turned her focus to cybersecurity, knowing how critical it is in the fabric of technology. Today she leads a company integrating security into software development. Check out our video below, and be sure to check out the full audio interview.
My colleague Rob Stretchay completed research on the challenges organizations face as their applications become more distributed across clouds. In this video, we discuss some of his findings, including how developers are spending their time – including their time remediating security issues. This is interesting to me because we've been talking about developer workflows and whether developers can take on some security processes. Developers want to focus on building software, but they care about quality, reliability, and they don’t want to waste time doing rework. Check out the video to hear us discuss the opportunity for security solutions to help.
This week I'm pleased to share my interview with Sharon Goldberg, the cofounder and CEO of BastionZero. She is also a computer science professor at Boston University. Check out our video below, and listen to the full audio interview.
In our very first interview, we’re proud to spotlight Vandana Verma Sehgal. Vandana is the Chair of the Board of Directors for the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Foundation. The non-profit foundation works to improve application security, organizing projects, tools, documents, forums, and chapters all over the world. Vandana is also passionate about initiatives to bring more diversity to cybersecurity.
This month as we observe Women’s History Month to celebrate the vital role of women in history, I’m excited to kick off our new series on Women in Cybersecurity. I’m excited about this program to connect women in the industry, and to spotlight their stories, with the hope to increase representation and encourage women in the field.
