Meet Siroui Mushegian, Barracuda’s new CIO

Siroui Mushegian recently joined Barracuda as our new Chief Information Officer and brings more than 20 years of executive and IT leadership experience at organizations ranging from Ralph Lauren and the NBA to PBS and beyond.

To help you get to know Siroui a little better we recently sat down with her to talk about her role at Barracuda, her perspective on IT and cybersecurity, IT challenges at different types of organizations, and current cyber threats.

Q&A with Barracuda CIO Siroui Mushegian

How do you view the role of IT at Barracuda? How do you see it fitting in with the rest of the company?

IT is, in my opinion, meant to be a forcing function of productivity, simplicity, and cost optimization. We are there to help employees get to the end result they're looking for. If that's using business systems, it's about the best way to help someone get their business process supported and underpinned by a system such as Salesforce or NetSuite, for example. If it's in terms of employees using technology to work in an everyday scenario, then it's about the way that we procure and roll out equipment so that you have the best laptop or the best tools that we can provide to do your job in the most efficient way possible.

IT is also important in the onboarding process especially in the ways we can look to improve the new hire experience so that employees have all the access and tools they need on day one. There are tweaks we are planning to make in the way that the IT team interacts with employees to help them have a great experience with technology.

How do you and your team approach cybersecurity? How do you see that fitting in with IT?

Those two areas have to march hand in hand. If there was a Venn diagram for cybersecurity and IT, they have to overlap so much that it's almost the same circle. Whether it’s patch management,  instituting infrastructure configuration changes, or something else that the cybersecurity team is looking to implement, in many cases it’s the IT team who is not only working with cybersecurity on the project plan, but also carrying out the implementation itself. It's almost as though one team starts the sentence, and the other team finishes it. In that way, the technology and security teams must be aligned and supportive of each other.

You've worked at a variety of different types of companies in a wide variety of industries. What differences have you noticed in the challenges IT faces?

In many ways, technology is the same regardless of whether you're talking about the NBA, a luxury retail company like Ralph Lauren, or a media organization. The challenges are very similar. You've got people, process and technology.

The differences depend on what the business is, of course. If you’re at a SaaS company, you're supporting a sales organization that needs to be fast and nimble and has to have systems that help them quote fast and understand their customers very well. If you're at a media company, you're trying to understand the consumers on the other end of the television or other end of the screen. So, the industry that you're involved in changes the tune slightly, but people, process, and technology are always at the heart of the organization.

Are there any types of threats that you're most concerned about at the moment from an IT perspective?

I'm very concerned about social engineering right now. Every type of cybersecurity bad actor out there is a concern to us across the board, but every single employee of Barracuda or in any environment could be the missing link in a social engineering attack. The scary part is you could try your very best to check all the links that are in an e-mail or to validate the e-mail address that a message came from, or to make sure that you don't open attachments from senders you don’t recognize, but you could still get tricked.

We all must be so vigilant, and we must  lean into technology to help us where possible. Thankfully, Barracuda has a lot of technology that can help us be thoughtful stewards of cybersecurity to keep us safe and protect our brand.

Any final thoughts or anything you're looking forward to in your time ahead here at Barracuda?

I'm excited about all of it. Every time I wake up and get started for the day, I see another set of opportunities for us to excel and to help support our business. To me, that is the most exciting part of what we'll be able to do. Simply creating a more nimble environment and employees that are happier about the technology they're using every day, whether that is a system or a computer or the way that they interact to get help. All of it is a journey for us, and I'm excited to help make it greater than it’s already been.