DEEP DIVE
WE ‘DEEP DIVE’ WITH EDWARD FRYE, CISO, ARYAKA
NETWORKS, WHO TELLS US ABOUT LIFE
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICE.
Aryaka, a leading cloud-first WAN
company, brings agility, simplicity and
a great experience to consuming the
WAN-as-a-Service. The company’s
customers include hundreds of global
enterprises including several in the
Fortune 100.
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What would you describe
as your most memorable
achievement in the
cybersecurity industry?
My most memorable achievement in
the cybersecurity industry is building
a world-class information security
management system (ISMS) from
scratch and achieving ISO 27001
certification in an unprecedented
two months. I was able to achieve
this because the organisation had
considerable momentum attained
from customer requirements
and commitments.
What first made you
think of a career in
cybersecurity?
As with so many in cyber,
I seemed to just fall into
it. I had an initial interest
in cybersecurity during
secondary school and joined
the US Air Force directly
after to become a network
engineer. From there,
I officially entered the
world of cybersecurity
when I was working as
a consultant and the
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company at the time sent me to
firewall training, after which they
changed my title to Security Engineer. What do you think is the
current hot cybersecurity
talking point?
This developed into giving me more
and more security tasks. From here,
I seemed to be getting into various
different areas of cybersecurity and
at some point, I started seeking out
those different areas in an attempt
to broaden the depth and scope of
knowledge and understanding. The problem with ‘hot
cybersecurity talking points’
is that they’re generally buzz
words and marketing budgets.
What should be hot topics in
cybersecurity should be ‘doing
all the basics, all the time’. This
means prioritising things like
knowing where all your assets are,
what data you have and who is
accessing it. Once you have these
basics down and are doing them
all the time, things like Machine
Learning and threat hunting
become ideas to pursue. A lot of
the recent data breaches are caused
by someone not doing the basics,
such as misconfigured cloud storage
databases, or not patching servers in
a timely manner, etc.
What style of management
philosophy do you employ with
your current position?
I try to hire really naturally smart
people and encourage independent
work from my team. I am about
building relationships and fostering
open communication to ensure the
team has the resources to perform
in their roles. I have also fully set out
professional development goals for all
team members, including myself, as
part of our annual goals. There is also
a budget set aside which focuses on
training employees and expanding their
knowledge. This prioritises enabling
them to attend conferences and
broaden their understanding of cyber
and all that this entails.
How do you deal with stress
and unwind outside the office?
I like to get out of the technology
space while keeping things technical
and analytical, as contradictory as
that may sound. As a risk management
professional, I enjoy managing risk in
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