Inside Cylake’s Design Partner Program with Nick Campagna

Cylake is building its cybersecurity platform with direct input from the organizations it is being designed to serve.

In the fifth episode of Inside Cybersecurity, René Bonvanie sits down with Nick Campagna, Vice President of Product Management at Cylake, to go inside Cylake’s Design Partner program and discuss what the team is learning as it works with security and technology leaders across critical infrastructure, healthcare, financial services, service providers, manufacturing, and other complex environments.

Design partners are brought into the development process early. They walk the Cylake team through their environments, technology stacks, operational processes, and security requirements. As development progresses, they provide feedback on everything from interactive product mockups to beta versions of the system.

Those conversations are already surfacing common cybersecurity problems.

Legacy security stacks can make it difficult to see an attack across an organization’s entire environment. Static detection rules cannot anticipate every attack technique. And in highly regulated and operationally sensitive environments, decisions about AI, hardware, data residency, and cloud connectivity come with constraints that cannot be treated as an afterthought.

The conversations are shaping the product in more specific ways, too. Nick describes how multiple design partners independently raised the importance of business context in security operations: understanding not just that an asset is behaving suspiciously, but what that asset does for the organization before deciding how to respond.

For Cylake, that is the point of the program. Design partners aren’t shown a finished product and asked whether they like it. They are actively helping shape how the platform works before commercial launch.

Nick:Everybody’s concerned about tokens because they understand that GenAI is an important part of cybersecurity going forward. When that GenAI runs on a frontier model in a public cloud, you know you’re going to pay for it. And folks are concerned they’ll have to make a choice. They’ll get to six months into the year and then run out of tokens. And then what? Go back to the old way of doing things?

René:Probably be earlier than six months, maybe. Pony up and pay more.

Nick:But when you run those LLM capabilities on your own hardware, there are no token costs, right? You know, you’ve got all the power that you need on the appliances themselves.

René:I love it when I see that sparkle in your eye when we talk about hardware because, you know, we’ve done this before, right? But this is a whole different ball game. This is a completely vertically integrated stack. And that hasn’t been done for a long, long time. And this is the team to go do it.

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