Hello and welcome to The Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. My guest today is Emil Sayegh. He's the CEO of Ntirety, and a really interesting guy, Lebanese guy, Austin, Texas, UT grad, four kids, two of whom were in college, one at his alma mater, the other enjoying watching a spectacular football season at TCU. Emil is a well established executive in product and cloud role, having spent time at Rackspace, Dell, Codero. His last role was as CEO of Cero and eventually he was tapped by private equity to lead Hostway, who, if you remember, was a leader in shared hosting. Eventually, Hostway merged with hosting.com, a company with a similar history in shared hosting. Which is why I was surprised to hear about the trajectory of the business today.
Ntirety is entirely a different company than you might expect. Yeah, I did that, I guess I'm feeling it coming out the holiday weekend here, but as far as Emil, he, he strikes me as a professional change agent. He led cloud at Rackspace. He's taking companies public. He's been tapped for business turnarounds and exits, and currently in pulling together two similar companies and turning them into something wholly different, centering around managed services and cybersecurity.
In talking about that, he leveraged the old Wayne Gretzky moniker of “skating to where the puck is going”. Really an essential discussion to think about as a technology leader. We can't know what's next, but we do have to consider it. Marking conditions, end risks will change, and being prepared and even taking some chances on what might be next is an absolute requirement for technology leaders, and what frankly makes discussions like those we have here on The Bridge really important. Emil oversaw the merger of Hostway and hosting.com in 2018 with a vision of focus on managed services, but particularly cybersecurity and backup and recovery.
They were rewarded frankly, for that vision when the pandemic struck. We also had an important discussion about security, compliance, and governance, and the expectations on businesses. Making a great discussion short for this intro, no business is expected to be perfect, but you are expected to follow documented best practices. You are expected to have a plan, and most importantly, you are expected to be able to recover, which Emil pointed out is too often not part of the security provider playbook. We talked about the importance of security training, both internally and with a stance towards the supply chain. Supply chain being sort of that uncontrolled partner inside of your four walls.
He mentioned that 40 to 60% of mid-market companies that get hacked do not recover inside of a year. There's a clear ROI to cybersecurity investments, but it's often confused, or in some cases ignored, in favor of actual insurance or cyber insurance. A very important discussion for business executives to listen to.
I challenged Emil to answer the question, or the objection, I should say, of Emil, I'll just increase my cyber insurance. Something that you may be hearing from your executive team or even considering yourself as a technology leader. Emil writes extensively about cybersecurity, but specifically about this topic, in Forbes Magazine.
We'll make sure that we include the link to that in the show notes. Even if you don't have time to listen to the entire pod, please jump to about the 26 minute of the interview portion. I don't want to steal his words, but real lessons to be learned about cyber insurance and how that differs from actually having a real IT governance and compliance policy internally. So, I won't steal his words. Time to jump in. Here we go. My talk with Emil Sayegh of Ntirety.
Contact Emil
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilsayegh/
Forbes article that Emil referenced in this episode: