We recently had the opportunity to connect with James Young, Principal Security Strategist for Splunk and newly appointed strategic advisor for Synqly. With over 25 years of experience in technical field sales, product management, and cybersecurity ecosystem development, Young shares his insights on the evolving landscape of cybersecurity integration and the growing importance of streamlined, standardized approaches to technology partnerships.
Q: Can you tell us about your background and expertise in cybersecurity?
James: I decided to focus on cybersecurity about 25-30 years ago, believing it would be a perpetual sector of the IT industry that would continue to evolve and enable me to work across a range of technology categories. After graduating from university in the mid-90s and spending about a decade in cybersecurity, I transitioned from the end-user space to the vendor side in the early 2000s.
My motivation for joining the vendor space was straightforward: I needed clarification on the gap between what vendors promised and what customers received. I wanted to help improve the outcomes that security vendors provided to customers and focus on solving real security challenges.
More recently, I’ve moved into product management and product strategy at Splunk, focusing on ecosystem approaches and AI driven workflows to deal with the complexity customers face in cybersecurity. I aim to find ways to transform and streamline time-to-value when solving key security challenges.
Q: How are integrations critical to cybersecurity?
James: The criticality of high-quality integrations has become increasingly apparent, particularly in data analytics and security operations and incident response. The complexity and scale of data make it challenging and time-consuming for customers to integrate various pieces of technology to achieve their desired outcomes.
As security solutions become more prevalent across companies of all sizes and maturity levels, the ecosystem approach that enables faster time to value is becoming crucial. Customers are growing disillusioned with buying solutions they struggle to operationalize within their existing security architecture. This often leads to a cycle of swapping technologies and getting caught up in marketing hype without improving security outcomes.
Organizations don’t have the time and resources to invest in making their complicated security architectures work together. Vendors need to be part of the solution and work together to help solve these problems. A well-integrated cybersecurity fabric, facilitated through high-quality integrations across a broad ecosystem of best-in-breed technologies, enables organizations to focus on digital transformation initiatives and other business priorities.
Q: What’s the significance of having a strong integration ecosystem when evaluating vendors?
James: The importance of integration capabilities depends on the technology category and maturity level. For newer technologies, well-documented APIs that fit into a DevOps culture might be sufficient for mature customers. However, as technologies become commoditized, integrations must become out-of-the-box features rather than customer-built or customer-customized solutions.
We’re never going to have a single vendor offering best-in-breed solutions across all areas of cybersecurity given the rate of evolution in this space. Additionally, security technologies increasingly need to integrate with other security tools, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps pipelines. Balancing flexible API-based integration capabilities for skilled teams and rapid, out-of-the-box integrations for commoditized technologies is key.
Q: What makes Synqly’s approach to integration unique?
James: Synqly’s uniqueness lies in its standardized integration framework across many different categories of technologies. Currently, integration is typically done either by vendors choosing to build specific integrations or through case-by-case outsourcing. Given the vast size of the security technology landscape, no single vendor can maintain a comprehensive ecosystem of integrations across different vendors, no matter how much they invest.
Synqly’s Integration as a Service technology enables consistent integration building that will scale over time, reducing the need for vendors to focus on case-by-case integrations. Their IPaaS solution is unique, and importantly, they also offer non-cloud options, which is crucial for many customers who can’t or won’t move everything to the cloud.
Q: What would you say to heads of engineering and product about the benefits of a platform like Synqly?
James: From a product and engineering perspective, teams want to dedicate time to improving their core product. We never have enough engineers, product managers, or time, so we must maximize how we spend our resources on solving our primary problems and delivering key capabilities for our customers. The breadth of the security product landscape and the rate of evolution means that it is impossible for one vendor organization to dedicate sufficient resources to cover all integrations that may be required.
However, a product’s success largely depends on how quickly customers can deploy and operationalize it within their existing technology ecosystem. Each customer implementation becomes bespoke without a standardized integration approach, making it difficult to evolve your product consistently over time.
A standardized integration platform enables consistent product evolution within the broader technology ecosystem, making improvements more universally applicable across your customer base. This allows engineering and product teams to focus on their core competencies while ensuring their products integrate effectively with customers’ existing technology stacks.
The need for this platform has evolved significantly as the complexity of the technology stack and threat landscape has increased. With concepts like Zero Trust becoming more prevalent and security expanding across cloud environments, the need for standardized, consistent integration approaches has never been more critical.
