In their debut LP, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, the band introduces their defining theme that mankind’s evolution has reached the point—devolved to the point, actually—that we are converging on sameness… emotionless and robotic. This notion informed everything from the way Devo dressed (awesome!), to the music they wrote, to the way they performed.

What does the band Devo’s theme of devolution have to do with me joining a software company of the same name? More than you might think. 😉

From digital transformation to cloud to DevOps, the volume of machine data organizations must consider is skyrocketing. Much of its creation is now robotic to a degree that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. And through automation, some would like as much of the management and response of that data to be similarly emotionless and robotic. Indeed, turning this relentless machine-driven tsunami of data into insight that humans—specifically security professionals—can understand is perhaps the defining challenge for organizations worldwide. Without that insight and human element, no amount of hiring or automation can save us. We will miss critical data. Important events will go undetected. The talented humans who comprise security teams will have no opportunity to use their experience and expertise to respond.

I joined Devo largely because its core engine directly targets this problem. It can ingest and analyze data, in real time, ~10x faster than alternative solutions. 10x disruptive opportunities—moments when a new product is 10x better than the alternatives—don’t come along as often as they used to. Devo provides this magnitude of improvement and is doing it at the perfect time. We have built a platform and related solutions that automatically feed insights from all of an organization’s data directly into SOC team investigations, putting them at analysts’ fingertips. This enables analysts to apply their intuition, business knowledge, and creativity to secure those fast-growing terabytes and petabytes of data.

There are three reasons why these capabilities are critically important:

• First, as described above, forces such as digital transformation are making it hard to keep up with the huge data volumes organizations need to analyze as well as the growing number and sophistication of attacks.
• Second, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating customers’ desire for cloud-based SaaS solutions. Devo is unique in the market because we offer a cloud-native approach that fulfills these desires.
• Third, legacy technologies are falling short in these areas while at the same time their pricing is becoming punitive. Devo’s efficiency means that we offer quite a bit more at a lower cost.

Organizations urgently need a better mousetrap to turn the data tsunami into insight. That mousetrap yields an opportunity to leverage our humanity to turn that insight into action; to apply the thoughtful consideration at which humans excel. In this way, we will escape the fate that Devo’s music considered—machines abetting human devolution into indistinct automatons. Instead, we will harness our humanness, through technology, to improve our collective condition.

To accomplish this, we are leveraging our strong revenue growth to reinvest in our platform. At a high level, we plan this year to not only make Devo easier to use—so a broader range of customers can quickly gain value—but also extend the use cases Devo supports so customers can do more with it. For example, improving our in-product getting-started capabilities will guide new users, making it easier for them to get data into Devo and turn that data into actionable insight. At the same time, improving our security analytics capabilities to support specific use cases, such as threat hunting, will make it easier for customers to extend their use of Devo into new areas and thus realize an additional return on their investment.

Forces such as digital transformation, nation-state actors (e.g., the SolarWinds breach), fraud, and many others continue to drive record demand for cybersecurity solutions. To be effective, however, these platforms must handle enormous data sets with tremendous speed, ideally allowing streaming or real-time analysis of activity. Devo’s 10x, next-generation-level of scalability is unique in this regard. For an increasing number of organizations, we’re the only way they can fulfill these requirements with the desired level of performance.

Devo’s superpowers come from the raw performance of the core engine built by the founding team in Madrid. My experience with the company, I have learned, is no different than anyone else’s. At first, you don’t believe Devo can do what it claims. But then you take another look, examine the data, and realize that, yes, it really is that much faster than everything else. And it’s cloud-native as well. Data sets aren’t going to shrink, attacks aren’t going to go away, and performance never goes out of style… so whip it good. 🙂