Background

Evgeniy started his career in the Israeli navy, and has since then accumulated, a very large amount of cybersecurity experience, across many technical and non-technical domains. He has put in, over 40,000 hours, providing post and pre-sales support as an architect, and principal consultant in various technologies.

As a result, Evgeniy has become proficient in speaking on most cyber security technical domains, including Endpoint Security, Network Security, SIEM/SOC/SOAR, SASE/SEE, VMS, and Cloud Security, to name a few.

But it was in the navy that it all started, working on IT technologies. From there a career stint at Checkpoint to sharpen his skills, before he came to Canada and began his diverse 15-year career with the Herjavec Group, where Evgeniy was promoted to as VP, Cybersecurity Solution Architecture. Evgeniy now runs his own successful cybersecurity consulting business, runs two much in demand podcasts and is a board advisor with the Canadian Cybersecurity Network.

We recently had an opportunity to sit down and ask Evgeniy a few questions.

Evgeniy, tell us something interesting about you, that people might not know?

Although I do a lot of podcasts now and webinar moderation, until about 5 years ago, I really struggled in communicating in English as it is my third language. So, I decided to invest in myself, going to a speech therapist, joining Toastmasters, reading about how to improve, recording myself and asking others for feedback. I received great advice a few years back from someone who said, that while I should try to improve my English, to not try to remove my accent. Someone’s unique accent is a benefit for others to remember your voice, your personality and your passion. He suggested to keep it at all cost.

Evgeviy’s advice to new entrants?

Don’t get into the industry simply as a pentester if you want to truly understand cybersecurity. To fully understand cybersecurity, you need to understand the whole distributed network and that takes years of dedication. Try to broaden your overall network knowledge from servers, to endpoints, cloud, IOT, etc.

He also suggests not to look at linear or traditional cybersecurity paths but to look beyond and understand what you are truly passionate about, your personality and marry it to cybersecurity. Evgeniy, also rightfully points out that cybersecurity includes every role possible from marketing, to HR, to finance, etc. where your knowledge of cyber will also be key to success.

A quick glimpse into the future of cybersecurity

AI is here to stay, so look to understand it and how to leverage it where it can be helpful and avoid it where it can be harmful. Cloud, SaaS and outsourcing of cybersecurity solutions is also creating a need for trust/risk with vendors as to what is happening to your data and if it is truly secure. How that will be managed and shared is critical going forward. Also, with remote work here to stay, it’s now important to understand individual personas, their work patterns, usage, etc. to identify behavior important to how policies need to be managed.

What do you love about this community?

Cybersecurity is very dynamic, fast, there is always a lot to learn, you can never get bored if you have an active mind. The learning and business opportunities are endless.

Because of what we have learnt, it’s important to give back, share knowledge and mentor others on their journey.

Anything else…

One of the things I give a lot of thought to is the existence of mistrust in our industry between vendors and customers. We need to develop an approach where we can develop more trust, and direct communication between vendors and customers, so that bad actors do not get the upper hand.