CyCognito Adds Two Security Industry Veterans to Leadership Team to Meet Growing Demand to Uncover Supply Chain and Attack Surface Risks in 2021

Michael Trites joins as senior vice president of global sales, Ansh Patnaik joins as senior vice president of global product management

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CyCognito, the leader in attack surface protection and digital risk protection, today announced that Michael Trites and Ansh Patnaik have joined the leadership team to lead sales and product development, respectively, and equip more organizations with the ability to uncover shadow risk across their extended IT ecosystem, including their supply chain.

Trites’s track record of bringing disruptive technology products to market spans nearly 30 years leading successful teams across sales, field engineering and channels. Prior to joining CyCognito he was the Executive Vice President of Sales at BigID, Vice President of Sales, Americas at Zimperium and has held numerous sales management positions at leading technology companies including Riverbed, NitroSecurity, and Enterasys Networks (formerly Cabletron Systems).

“I’m very excited to join the CyCognito team to help organizations more fully address previously unknown attack surface risks and exposed systems and assets. From Fortune 500 corporations on down, it’s clear that organizations realize these are now essential capabilities. Still, the vast majority have largely manual processes and point solutions in place that simply don’t address assets that are unknown, forgotten or under third-party control, nor do existing approaches scale from an OPEX perspective.”

Patnaik is a cloud security product leader who was most recently Director, Cloud Security Products for Google Cloud Platform, and Chief Product Officer for Chronicle, prior to the acquisition of Chronicle by Google. Previously, he was VP of Product Management at Oracle where he defined and launched their Security Analytics Cloud service. Over the last 20 years, Ansh has held product management, marketing and sales engineering roles at cybersecurity and data management market leaders including Delphix, ArcSight (acquired by HP), and BindView (acquired by Symantec).

“CyCognito has assembled a world class research and development organization to execute on the vision of giving security teams a continuous advantage over attackers who are increasingly focused on the paths of least resistance in organizations’ attack surfaces. I’m honored to be an integral part of the team, forging new territory, and building on CyCognito’s already stellar offering,” Patnaik observed. “This is a fantastic opportunity to create and lead an entirely new security product category, and bring to market a series of products that protects companies from shadow risk.”

“I’m thrilled to welcome Mike and Ansh to the CyCognito leadership team and look forward to working closely alongside both,” said Rob Gurzeev, CEO and co-founder of CyCognito. “The coming year will be one of pivotal growth for CyCognito across our product offerings and the business as a whole. Awareness has increased dramatically around the need to understand and manage an organization’s attack surface, driven in-part this past year by accelerated digital transformation initiatives, work-from-home rollouts and, in recent weeks, supply chain attacks. This is the right time to invest in and scale up our executive team with these two proven professionals.”

About CyCognito
CyCognito solves one of the most fundamental business problems in cybersecurity: seeing how attackers view your organization, where they are most likely to break in, what systems and assets are at risk and how you can eliminate the exposure. Founded by national intelligence agency veterans, CyCognito has a deep understanding of how attackers exploit blind spots and a path of least resistance. The Palo Alto-based company is funded by leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and its mission is to help organizations protect themselves from even the most sophisticated attackers. It does this with a category-defining, transformative platform that automates offensive cybersecurity operations to provide reconnaissance capabilities superior to those of attackers.

Media Contact:
Raphael Reich
raphael@cycognito.com