Meet The Team at SteelCloud
Between intensifying STIG and CIS needs to thwart increasing cyberattacks and the new CMMC requirements for the commercial sector, SteelCloud’s ConfigOS compliance automation software is having a moment. Demand is high. Sales are strong. And SteelCloud is now a Top 10 Cloud Security Provider, according to Enterprise Security magazine. Meet the team who takes Cybersecurity by the horn. We sat down with our Sales and Business Development team to get their take on everything from technical sales to why ConfigOS has a reputation as a unicorn. Here is what Nigel Hughes, Vice President of Sales, and Steve Manolakis, Director, Business Development, had to say.
Nigel, you’ve been with SteelCloud for nearly 16 years. What’s top of mind in the cybersecurity sector, and how has that changed in recent years?
NIGEL: Security policy compliance and accreditation are always top of mind at SteelCloud – our developers work tirelessly to build compliance automation solutions for the Defense and Civilian agencies enabling them to easily protect their infrastructure by attaining high levels of compliance with STIG and CIS policy. Amidst this, threats are increasing, so stringency in complying with these STIG and CIS standards is increasingly important. ConfigOS helps customers rapidly comply and sustain ongoing compliance with these policy standards to thwart these nefarious actors. The government and industry are now quite rightly taking these risks extremely seriously – in many ways having a policy compliant infrastructure is the single most affective defense action against such threats.
Steve, you’re fairly new to SteelCloud. How is your previous experience informing your time here?
STEVE: Coming from an intensive business development background has made for a smooth transition. Prior to SteelCloud, I gained a wealth of experience in the sales development function, managing client accounts and building a sales team. These are all areas I’m continuing to operate in today. That foundation of knowledge has afforded me the opportunity to focus my early time on learning from people here in all areas of the business and our customers.
What kinds of skills lead to success in technical sales?
STEVE: For any sales candidate, the three C’s are always a good place to start – Coachable, Competitive, and Curious. Two other traits I look for are resourcefulness and accountability. From my experience, these tend to be consistent leading indicators of success. In addition, they lend well to becoming skilled in building relationships, solving problems, and collaborating with others. And using the three C’s approach, along with finding a candidate with resourcefulness and accountability, emphasizes on longer term outcomes – we don’t just want to be the solution for our customers now but also move forward together.
NIGEL: Industry and technology experience is always helpful but good technical salespeople need to be detail-oriented, empathetic, and compelling. Understanding the customers’ needs and being able to map the solution to those requirements with integrity is key. Relationship building, responsiveness, good listening skills and dependability are all importing in rounding out the skillset for a successful career. At SteelCloud we always seek partnerships with our customers and integrators where we work together for any given deployment collaboration. Solid account manager skills are essential to marshalling internal resources needed to ensure the customer’s success.
What pains and desires are you hearing from the customer?
STEVE: Having these types of conversations is a part of the job I enjoy immensely. We have such talented technical and product development experts who know how to navigate the obstacles our customers face. To the customers, cybersecurity is a fire drill. It’s a big, necessary burden. And we take so much of that burden away for them. The resulting positivity is very gratifying. People are spending too much time on repetitive tasks. We’re eliminating days and weeks out of their timeline.
NIGEL: Everyone gets it that security policy compliance is key in the ongoing cyber warfare battles – automation of applying those policies and rapid accreditations remain critically important. Finite financial and human resources are a major pain point though – we’re seeing inflationary pressures around hiring good quality people where there’s not enough people to do all the works that must be done. We’re also seeing government leadership edicts for operationalization and automation of cyber compliance – these are key tenets for modernization and moving more and more infrastructure to the cloud. The STIG and CIS requirements are the same whether we’re in the cloud or not, but compliance automation can remove weeks and months out of the cloud migration and accreditation timelines.
Is this why they call ConfigOS a unicorn?
NIGEL: There’s a story to that. We had a demo set up with a major system integrator and set aside two hours for our pitch and demo. To our surprise, the integrator showed up with two servers, plopped them on the conference room table, and said, “STIG these! Prove you can do it in an hour like your marketing says!” Of course, we were taken a little by surprise, but I went ahead with our positioning presentation while our engineer powered up the servers and began deploying ConfigOS. When my presentation was done, we connected the HDMI cable to the first server, a Windows Server and showed the audience we’d gone from 53% compliance to 94% and then showed the second server, a Red Hat Linux Server, go from 59% to 89%! The integrator said, “Wow, almost all vendors we challenge in this way only come up with excuses – you guys actually delivered! You’re kind of like a unicorn vendor!” So that is where our unicorn story started. They went into procurement that afternoon!
As more in the DIB move toward their CMMC certification, are any clients working ahead?
NIGEL: While there’s been some uncertainty and confusion with CMMC, we’re now at CMMC 2.0 and looking good for the DoD’s announcements in May next year. CMMC readiness requires that the Defense Industrial Base whose numbers top 300,000 or more, demonstrate good cyber hygiene standards consistent with DoD policy. CMMC is a multi-faceted set of requirements around cyber and physical security standards. Those who navigate their way through the NIST documentation will get through 800-171 and 800-53 and find themselves looking at the 800-128 and eventually get to 800-70 where the learn all about checklists. This is where they determine they must comply with either STIG or CIS policy benchmark standards.
What is your favorite part of your job? Why do you do this?
STEVE: It’s problem-solving. I love that aspect of this job. I’m surrounded by incredibly talented colleagues here at SteelCloud, and ConfigOS is a product that addresses and automates obstacles faced consistently by any team responsible for STIG or CIS compliance. I love talking to people and hearing their issues and seeing if and how we can address them. It’s something my team gets excited about, too. So problem-solving is my favorite piece.
NIGEL: I love working at SteelCloud – what we do actually matters. It’s important. I also get to work with some awesome government and integrator cyber teams every day – many relationships established for several years and it’s such fun to collaborate. Doing my job helps the government simplify something that is really hard to do. It’s very gratifying to hear from customers and partners of how good an experience they’ve had with our product and our support teams. It also affirms the fact that we’re doing something highly relevant that allows the government and DIB to protect and lockdown their enterprise networks in STIG and CIS compliance. Working with customers is my favorite part of working at SteelCloud.
When Nigel and Steve aren’t touting the virtues of ConfigOS, you’ll find them both gearing up for this year’s World Cup Soccer Tournament in Qatar, a rare winter competition. Nigel is also a big supporter of the Boy Scouts with his four sons producing two Eagle Scouts and hopefully two future Eagle Scouts.
To learn more about Nigel, click here or visit his LinkedIn profile.
As for Steve, you might find him on the golf course on any given weekend, working on his stroke. To learn more about Steve, click here or visit his profile on LinkedIn. Or just schedule a demo and have them unleash their unicorn magic for you in person!
