At OneAdvanced, the company has undertaken a change programme across the entire organisation, he says, sitting down to speak with The Stack. For Baird, that involved looking at its operational resilience and product strategy, the security tooling that is relied upon, and asking the questions - “are we utilising the right tools, are we getting the most value out of those tools, and do we have the right partnerships with vendors and suppliers?” he says.

One challenge in cybersecurity is making sure that security toolings don’t end up as shelfware – that such assets are sweated fully. Sometimes this can be because the right skill sets required to properly implement tooling an organisation purchased isn’t there. To some extent, this was the case with the Qualys implementation OneAdvanced had started, meaning they weren’t going to get the most of it. Baird saw it as an opportunity to reset.

“The first step I took was to pause and do a health check. Only once I had done this was I comfortable reporting our vulnerability risk to the business, because I knew I could stand by the figures that I was showing them,” Baird explains. From this point on, the company could ensure the implementation of Qualys was optimised and delivered real value.

Baird says one of his priorities as a leader is always ensuring that security works more closely with the business to improve cyber-resilience.

He says that having progressed from the IT coal face, to a leadership position much closer to business priorities, has taught him some valuable lessons about the balance you need to strike as a security professional.

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