In the high-speed world of cybersecurity, the difference between a breach and a breakthrough often comes down to endurance. Tony Giandomenico, Senior Director of Product Management with Cisco Talos, joins me to discuss how he balances the intensity of leading major product launches with the grueling discipline of Ironman triathlons.
Beyond the technical specs and new threat hunting features, this conversation dives deep into the human side of leadership. Tony shares his hard-won lessons on the power of communication, the importance of knowing your "why," and how to navigate the complexities of a 30-year career without losing your focus.
Amy Ciminnisi: You have been in the thick of the cyber security world for a while now, and a lot of things have shifted in this field. So what has been the biggest surprise for you, and what keeps you excited about leading the charge on the product side?
Tony Giandomenico: Well, I would probably say that the biggest shift over the last six months has been the increase rate of the capabilities of these frontier models. I'm the first one not to jump on the bandwagon of this stuff, because I've been doing this for about 30 plus years or so, but I think this feels a little different. The capabilities are increasing, and I think what that means to cybersecurity is a big shift. How do we deal with all that? From the adversary side, they're actually breaking in the networks like they typically do. They're moving laterally within the environment. They're evading different types of security controls. Finding vulnerabilities, exploiting those vulnerabilities, all of that stuff.
It's also going to be supercharged on the defensive side. Of course, you don't bring a knife to a gun fight, right? You're going to use the same AI technology — you know, the same frontier models — to speed things up there as well. From the product management side, I think we're going to see the things that we would have previously seen five years down the road a lot sooner. And that's kind of that's what kind of excites me about everything — that opportunity to explore the art of possibility is a lot more at your fingertips where it wasn't necessarily before.
AC: We specifically lined this episode up with the Cisco Talos Threat Hunting launch, which you played a major role in. For people who aren't familiar, can you explain what it is?
TG: Threat hunting is where we're looking for different types of threats that are circumventing our existing security control alerts, detection mechanisms, and so on. When defenders invest in these different types of technologies that are automatically detecting alerts or threats in your environment, the challenge that they have is the sensitivity meter. If they set it to be too high, the team might get inundated with false positives, and then that particular product isn't really worth that investment because you're constantly have to investigate those. So the sensitivity meter has to find some place in the middle. That's where it gives these stealthy threat actors a place to live. So you have a combination of AI and human-in-the-loop services, where we build hypotheses to identify actors that may have actually already circumvented your security controls.
Currently, we're hunting in the endpoint telemetry side (e.g., Secure Endpoint) that we offer our customers today. With this expansion, we're expanding it out to our flagship firewall product. So we'll be hunting within Secure Firewall as well as identity, which actually includes Duo and CII, which is Cisco Identity Intelligence.
AC: How do you keep your cool and stay focused on the why behind the work when you're dealing with the intensity of a major launch?
TG: Before coming to Cisco, I had a small cybersecurity consulting company for about 10 years or so out in the Hawaiian Islands. I had the domain expertise, but I had to learn financial aspects, sales, and marketing. I also had to understand what makes people tick. I wasn't able to talk to every individual the same way to get them on board with things. So the biggest thing that I took away when I went from running my business to working in a larger organization was that when folks are in different departments, there are competing priorities and I have to influence them. I have to get them to understand and believe in the vision. So if you go in there with that mindset, knowing that it's not going to flow exactly how you envisioned, things just work out.
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