Exabeam appoints Gorka Sadowski as chief strategy officer
Exabeam announced the appointment of industry veteran and former Gartner analyst Gorka Sadowski to chief strategy officer. Exabeam has grown rapidly over the past six years as it has executed on its vision for enhancing security teams with analytics and automation.
As the types of attacks and number of attackers proliferate, strategic clarity becomes increasingly important to meet future demands, both for Exabeam and its customers. Sadowski’s guidance will be especially important at a time when so many security organizations are under-staffed and feeling overwhelmed by the number of security events they have to investigate.
In his role, Sadowski will be responsible for developing, executing and sustaining corporate strategic initiatives. He will also serve as a sounding board for the Exabeam product roadmap and vision to drive growth.
Reporting directly to CEO Nir Polak, he’ll work with leaders across the organization on cross-functional initiatives and educate prospective customers, partners, analysts and media on the value of analytics and automation in a security program.
Throughout Sadowski’s 30-year cybersecurity career, he has held roles spanning marketing, business development, strategy and sales and gained a deep understanding of the trends and risks of the industry. Before joining the Exabeam team, he served as a senior director and analyst at Gartner, focused on security operations for IT leaders.
At the analyst firm, he was responsible for consulting with clients and working with a wide variety of security vendors to drive coverage for SIEM, SOC futures and trends, and managed detection and response (MDR). He authored and co-authored Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities research on SIEM.
Prior to joining Gartner, Sadowski also served as the director of business development at Splunk, where he was responsible for building the security ecosystem from strategy to execution.
He was also responsible for creating and implementing Splunk’s Partner Pavilion at Splunk .conf, where he was first introduced to Exabeam. At this event, he saw Exabeam emerge as the most promising organization in the security analytics space.
Before his tenure at Splunk, he established presence for LogLogic in Southern Europe, ran security go-to-market activities, including security consulting, delivery and service packaging, for Unisys in France, and launched the first partner-led intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) in the industry as head of NetScreen’s emerging technology efforts.
“The security industry is further aligning to the concept of the customer journey with an iterative and continuous improvement model — a journey that Exabeam has been on for quite some time,” said Polak.
“We are excited to welcome Gorka to the team, as he thoroughly understands what security analysts and leaders need in this competitive market. He has watched us skyrocket from a supplemental technology adding intelligence to vendors like Splunk to also being a SIEM market leader in our own right, and we look forward to the knowledge he will bring to accelerate our growth and industry disruption further.”
With investments shifting from preventative measures to a more balanced approach between prevention and detection and response, Sadowski’s expertise will drive Exabeam’s strategy to further align with the needs of the market.
Sadowski will work closely with Chief Product Officer Adam Geller to improve how analysts detect and respond to advanced threats such as insider threats and credential-based attacks, with technologies such as the Exabeam Cloud Platform and Exabeam Advanced Analytics.
“Rarely have I seen such a combination of strategic acumen and execution capabilities in the network security industry. After observing and knowing Exabeam over the years, I am overjoyed to join the company,” Sadowski said.
“As the cyberthreat landscape becomes more complex in our distributed but connected world, it is more crucial than ever before to arm security teams with the right tools they need to win the war against cyber adversaries.
“I look forward to working closely with Nir and the rest of the leadership team to identify key corporate initiatives to further establish Exabeam as the go-to leader in the market.”