Cloud Monitoring Firm Threat Stack Hires New CEO

By Ericka Chickowski 1

Continuous cloud security monitoring firm Threat Stack this week picked up former Lockheed Martin executive Brian M. Ahern as its new chief executive in a move that the firm hopes will amp up its growth. Launching its software in beta last November at Amazon re:Invent, Threat Stack has been on a tear over the last six months, which also saw the firm snag $5M in Series A1 funding and a technical partnership with PagerDuty to integrate with the operations performance software.

The Boston-based company hopes to make its mark on the cloud security market by helping its customers overcome the visibility gap that organizations large and small face when managing cloud environments, which don’t offer the kind of hardware-based controls and intrusion detection that on-premises systems would. It’s software collects cloud server activity including logins, processes, network activity and file changes and combines that with algorithms and data analytics on the back end to pinpoint red-flag behavior when it occurs. Meanwhile, the partnership with Pagerduty makes it possible to layer this monitoring into operations-related monitoring feeds for a more unified management stack via PagerDuty.

While details are still forthcoming on where Ahern will take the company, he says his new firm is in a great position of growth.

“I am extremely excited about the opportunity to lead Threat Stack into its next stage of growth,” said Ahern. “It is one of those perfect storm scenarios where you have the right product, market demand, and team all coming together at the right time to create a world-class, sustainable, disruptive cloud security company.”

Ahern will also take over as chairman of the board at the company and he says his first priorities are expanding the company’s team and looking to current customers for feedback in driving further technology development of the platform.

Threat Stack board members believe he’ll be able to steer the course as the company matures. Leading a company in its venture-fueled infancy is hardly a new prospect for Ahern. Prior to this position, he founded and led the security firm Industrial Defender, which developed compliance and change management solutions for industrial control systems. His leadership eventually led to the acquisition of his firm by Lockheed in April of 2014.

“Ahern’s entrepreneurial spirit and experience in transforming startups into global market leaders made him a logical choice to bring Threat Stack to the next level,’ says Chris Lynch, Threat Stack board member and investing partner at FKA. “We are happy to have him on board and are excited about Threat Stack’s bright future.”