Vectra appoints ex-Admiral CISO Steve Cottrell as EMEA CTO

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vectra AI, a leader in threat detection and response, today announced that it has appointed Steve Cottrell as its EMEA CTO. Steve will work to strengthen relationships with customers and prospects, security communities, government and intelligence agencies to identify key security pain points, while helping evolve security strategies in support of cloud adoption.

Steve will also help security decision makers communicate the value of AI-driven threat detection and response tools to their teams and senior stakeholders.

"For decades, security teams have been hampered by information overload, and the task of finding the needle in the haystack using a traditional SIEM based approach has largely failed. Vectra's technology has the potential to radically enhance capabilities for CISOs and security teams when detecting and responding to breaches. Its industry-leading data science team coupled with truly world-class security researchers is a real game changer in this space," explains Steve Cottrell, EMEA CTO for Vectra AI. "I'm excited to champion Vectra's 'threat led' approach – using AI and machine learning to provide high fidelity alerts that identify potential breaches. Ultimately, this means security teams can deliver much greater value to their businesses in terms of breach resilience."

Steve has worked as a CISO in large enterprises for the past 15 years, bringing a wealth of experience to the Vectra team from key sectors including communications, telecoms, and insurance. Prior to working at Vectra, Steve undertook CISO roles at Fujitsu, Vodafone, Aviva, and Admiral Insurance. Before this, he was a security specialist at Intel.

"RansomOps, rapid digitalisation, and cloud adoption continue to transform the security landscape, so organisations need a new approach. That's why I'm particularly pleased Steve Cottrell has joined the team," explains Willem Hendrickx, SVP International for Vectra AI. "As we ramp up our focus on large enterprise accounts next year, Steve's insight and experience will be invaluable. He understands how combining state-of-the-art technology and talented people can drastically improve security. Steve will be our secret weapon in EMEA, helping make network and cloud and environments  safer. He'll achieve this by working with customers to bring Vectra's unique capabilities into their workflows and processes."

"Having spent a long time working as a CISO in large corporate environments, I understand the challenges CISOs and their teams face on an ongoing basis, and have seen first-hand when some security products have failed to deliver value," concludes Cottrell. "I now feel well placed to ensure that we are addressing the highest priority challenges for security teams, and crucially driving a rapid and tangible return on investment in terms of driving down risk."

About Vectra

Vectra^® is the leader in threat detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito^® platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using AI to enrich network metadata it collects and stores with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers four applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Stream^™ sends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Recall^™ is a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. Detect^™ uses AI to reveal and prioritise hidden and unknown attackers at speed. And Detect for Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 finds and stops attacks in enterprise SaaS applications and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. For more information, visit vectra.ai.

Media Contact 
Allison Arvanitis
Lumina Communications for Vectra
[email protected] 

SOURCE Vectra