Insights from Zoom’s CSO on Safeguarding a Constantly Evolving Product

When a company experiences such immense growth that the name becomes synonymous with video conferencing, the importance of security measures increases accordingly. Nathan Mills joins the podcast to discuss the risks that come along with protecting people and assets for one of the most visible, evolving companies in the world.

As an Electrical Engineer with an MS in Strategic Intelligence and Project Management credentials, Mills spent the past 20 years developing, implementing, managing, and innovating enterprise risk management frameworks. He has extensive international experience as a Foreign Service Officer (Security Engineering Officer) in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and as the Director of Security Risk and Crisis Management at General Electric before his current role of Head of Global Security (CSO – Physical) at Zoom. 

Key topics of Mills’ discussion with host Fred Burton include:

• Why the risk profile of a dynamic, highly visible product differs from a company with a more established line of business.
• How Mills structures his security program and the strategies he leverages to be more efficient.
• Advice for security teams who lead operations on a global scale and the top three things they should focus on.

Key takeaways:

08:29: Fred: You’re working in an industry and a company that has become almost like the word Google. And you think of the success over the pandemic and how you provide such a vital business continuity resource to the private sector.

09:00: Nathan Mills: Completely. Yeah, it’s it’s very interesting to work for a company that has become a verb and there’s a lot of unique risks that come with that. In regards to the growth stage of an IPO and being new and having a lot of attention, that risk profile is very different than the ‘okay now you’re established.’ You’ve been built people are using your products you have a market. Now you’re in different places in the world. Now you have people traveling a lot more and now you have an expanding portfolio of products. How does the physical security element come into play and help educate the executives and other people who are maybe not familiar with a mature physical security organization? 

13:29: Fred: What advice do you have for security teams who lead operations on a global scale?

14:12: Nathan Mills: One of the things that I’ve learned is how do you do more with less and I think that’s obviously a tired cliche, but leveraging the relationships is something that I think a lot of practitioners might overlook. The ability for me to get it in front of the right people at the right time to be able to influence change is the hardest part about it. So as I was building the program the one thing I constantly talked about with my team was building relationships with intentionality knowing who your stakeholders are within our groups and reaching out to them to build a cadence and learn more about them.