One year into his role as CSO, Yassir Abousselham sits down in Las Vegas with Eleanor Dallaway to talk about life as a chief security officer at enterprise identity provider, Okta
Tell me about your career path before you joined Okta
Prior to my appointment at Okta, I worked as CISO for the fintech company SoFi. Before that, I spent five years at Google working on corporate DLS security and in the security for payments vertical. Previously I worked in security at EY.
For a technology professional, working at Google is the Holy Grail. How did you manage to tear yourself away to pursue a new role?
Working at Google gave me great access and visibility into doing technology and security at scale. Google attracts a lot of sharp engineers, so I was exposed to a lot of good interaction and visibility. It was a fantastic experience. At some point however, for anyone in security, you want to take the next step and manage security from A to Z at one company. That wasn’t something I could do at Google and I felt ready to make that move.
So, how is your role as CSO for a technology vendor different to being a CSO at an end-user?
The scale of the challenge makes it more interesting. It takes a special mindset to do security for a security company.
In addition to successful authentication attempts, we also see attack attempts against our customers and our platforms. We don’t stop at analyzing traffic – we have to be able to harden the platform in a way that protects both Okta and Okta customers. Businesses are trusting us with their applications and their data and that is a great responsibility. We have to be ahead of the attacker to block those attacks.
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