Empowering People to Be Security Champions with Alvina Antar

Alvina Antar: For the longest time, we've heard how there's a ton of friction between the CIO and CISO and IT and security teams, where the security organization is developing strategies and IT hears about it and has to somehow deliver and execute against that strategy without any input around the decisions or choices that are made. And in reality, in order for us to be successful, we really need to operate as one team. And that's exactly what we're doing here, is the only way we can really build a security-first culture is if we operate as one team and not only just between IT and security, it's really building security champions across every part of the business. Every single employee should feel accountable for hardening our security posture.

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Speaker: Hello and welcome to Security Visionaries. You just heard from today's guest, Alvina Antar, CIO at Okta. With an ever-growing list of responsibilities, one of the biggest challenges CIOs face today is prioritization of decisions. These key choices require strategic focus and alignment across an organization to deliver on business initiatives. It's also a critical step in the overall effectiveness and the efficiency of security. Before we dive into Alvina's interview, here's a brief word from our sponsor.

Speaker: The Security Visionaries Podcast is powered by the team at Netskope. At Netskope, we are redefining cloud, data, and network security with a platform that provides optimized access and zero trust security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. To learn more about how Netskope helps customers be ready for anything on their sassy journey, visit netskope.com.

Speaker: Without further ado, please enjoy episode 19 of Security Visionaries with Alvina Antar, CIO at Okta, and your host Mike Anderson.

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Mike Anderson: Welcome to today's episode of the Security Visionaries Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Anderson. I'm the Chief digital and information officer here at Netskope. Today I'm joined by a special guest, Alvina Antar. We've basically lived parallel lives at different security companies, so this is gonna be a super fun conversation. Alvina, how are you doing today?

Alvina Antar: Wonderful, Mike, I'm so excited to hang out with you today.

Mike Anderson: Yeah, that's gonna be great. Funny story, Alvina and I share a similar boss in our background. We both work for a gentleman named Steve Schuckenbrock. Alvina worked for him at Dell, I work for him at Crossmark, but we share some common friends in our path as well. So look forward to that conversation as well. So the first thing off I have to start I always like to hear about people's journeys. So Alvina, tell me about your journey to becoming a CIO, especially like, I know you were in the SaaS space at Zuora, coming to Okta. Tell me a little bit about that journey that you went through.

Alvina Antar: Well, first off, Mike, yeah, we do have tons of mutual friends and I have loved to see what you're bringing in terms of thought leadership focused on security. So thank you for all that you're doing for the industry. So in terms of my journey, it's been fun and I just, I couldn't be more blessed. I journeyed to CIO what I... I wanted to be a professor, I wanted to be a math professor and ended up having my father convince me to study computer science instead since the heavy, heavy math influence. And then I ended up starting at Dell as you mentioned. So that was my first gig right outta college as a programmer at Dell in IT. I spent 17 years there and it was really magical and incredible 17 years and was able to touch on every part of the business, which was incredible. And I reached an inflection point in my time there where I really didn't feel like I was challenging myself and I was getting a little too comfortable and made a decision. It was a huge decision for me. Even after 17 years, it was a huge decision for me to leave. And then it was a leap of faith I and ended up landing as my first role as a CIO at Zuora. I was a customer at Zuora at the time at Dell and it was an incredible opportunity for me to really be their first CIO and spent six amazing years there. Now, I've been at Okta for two and a half years and having a blast.

Mike Anderson: You joined Okta I think around the same time that I joined Netskope, which was interesting 'cause we both joined. I don't know, did you join before the pandemic started or was it during the pandemic?

Alvina Antar: Oh no, it was at the heart of the pandemic. The interviews were all over Zoom and it was a tough time to switch companies, but it was really the best decision that I made. I knew Okta as a customer, long, long-time customer. And obviously I've followed the company and Todd and Freddie and all that they've built now over 14 years. And really it was the product, the vision, and the culture. The culture of builders and owners is what led me to Okta.

Mike Anderson: No, that's great. Definitely Okta is a great product. We've been a customer for a long time. I've been a customer for a very long time as well. And so it's a definitely a great product. It's been fun to see the journey not as a customer, it's been fun to see things evolve at Netskope. I play the role of customer zero and I know you do the same at Okta. Tell me a little bit, how does that play into your role today and what are you doing around that? How much do you get out talking about how Okta uses Okta?

Alvina Antar: Yeah, well that's a huge, huge part of all that we do. It's been an integral focus for our organization and actually when I joined two and a half years ago, we had a effort and program around Okta-on-Okta but over the last two and a half years we've really accelerated our investment as truly customer zero. And it's just been amazing to see our positioning in being able to really push our product and building strong, strong relationship with our product and engineering organization and being first adopters. Just this last year we adopted our Okta identity engine to drive passwordless experience for all of our employees. And it's just been, just an incredible experience to be able to be one of the first enterprise customers on our OIE platform and realize true business value realization as an internal customer and then being able to share the story.

Alvina Antar