The Security Imperative

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As PROS delivers profitable growth to companies through its AI-powered Profit & Revenue Optimization Platform, we take an inside look at the transformation of the firm's security apparatus

As the business world rushes headlong into the digitized future, process optimization is paramount. Despite the rapidly changing environment, most companies still lean heavily on spreadsheets and manual reporting to handle some of their most business-critical backroom processes.

When it comes to orders, physical workflows slow down the offer-to-order pipeline, resulting in reporting challenges, revenue leakage, and narrowing margins. The efforts generate more work for less profit and stymie overall growth.

In automating the end-to-end workflow of Offer Optimization, Offer Creation, Offer Marketing, and Order Management, PROS is revolutionizing the way businesses drive profit and revenue, making them smarter, more competitive, and more future-ready. With an astounding 3.1 trillion transactions and 3.5 million quotes, the PROS Platform is shepherding companies across the globe into incredibly successful futures.

Susanne Elizer Senoff

We recently spoke with Susanne Elizer Senoff, CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) of the Houston-based AI powerhouse. A 20-plus-year risk and security industry veteran, Senoff has held leadership roles in some of the world’s most successful firms, including Microsoft, McAfee, ARM, and Morgan Stanley. With a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia, Senoff’s original career plan was to save the world by working in government.

The pace of change proved too slow and her student loans too high, so she shifted into business process improvement. As a project manager at Morgan Stanley, she helped implement year one of Sarbanes-Oxley, then led their Institutional Securities program for four years.

Shortly thereafter, came marriage, motherhood, a cross-country move to Seattle, and work at a project management consulting firm. Her second project was none other than Microsoft. She eventually joined their team as security manager, right as they were going into the cloud with Azure.

“I had never worked at a tech company,” she confessed. “I knew nothing about security, but the hiring manager liked my background in getting things done and risks and controls, and knew I’d learn the rest. It was an excellent way to get into security, and I was working with top-notch people doing amazing cutting-edge work.”

Once again, life changes reshaped Senoff’s future. After the death of her first husband, she returned to consulting, moved to San Francisco, where she started the risk and security consulting practice for a firm, remarried, had another child, moved to Texas, and joined ARM. “In my view, it was the best training ground I ever had.” A senior role at McAfee followed. “When PROS found me, I had no intention of moving. I loved McAfee. I was having the best time, and, again, it was cutting edge with super smart people doing interesting work.”

Her decision to join PROS was influenced by their focus on AI and their innovative use of the technology, as well as their values-based business approach, focusing on the customer. “They sold me on kindness and collaboration and not a lot of ego, and since I've been here it's been true. We just want to do the right thing, so I felt like PROS was the place that I could be happy and be successful,” she stressed. “I told a friend recently that I am my best me.”

Best self meets best-in-class security

The PROS mission is to help people and companies outperform. “We’ve been in AI for 30 years,” Senoff pointed out. “It's in our blood. It is who we are.” Their AI-powered profit and revenue optimization software enables customers to set their best prices and shorten the sales cycle, while providing an improved customer experience. PROS supports multiple global industries, working extensively in travel, manufacturing, distribution, and service companies.

From a security standpoint, Senoff is leading the firm’s security transition in the cloud. “Our IT team moved into the Cloud last year, while the product team is expanding their existing cloud footprint. These efforts are requiring us to completely transform how we're looking at security,” she explained.

In the past, the security industry was focused on preventing the most likely attacks, using point solutions to protect a company’s most valuable assets. As a result, there may be multiple point solutions that may or may not talk to one another. “Black Swan events have become almost the norm, and those are starting to affect companies in ways that they had never expected, requiring more integration and more innovation,” she said.

Point solutions that can’t be integrated are no longer sufficient, so there is a keen focus on integrated tooling. Integration allows users across different functions to recognize signals that may be anomalies that can be exploited. “This is where AI also will become incredibly disruptive. We're already starting to see this innovation because it’s the best opportunity for security to start to get ahead of attackers.”

Integration extends to how security works with the business. “To protect and secure a business, security must be part of the business. We need to make sure that it isn't just us doing security,” she said. “It has to be every single person in the business, and it has to be embedded in all of our processes and tools.”

Companies are beginning to look at security from a developer’s perspective, figuring out where security functions can be placed to work most effectively. “It stops being a separate task and instead gets integrated and tied in with their team and the security team where we can see what everyone is doing and see what’s actually happening. A lot of the technology transformation that we're seeing is companies that are setting up whole platform solutions focused on the actual processes that are being secured, not just on a single security objective.”

That kind of transformation requires a different view of security and its implementation. PROS takes a centralized approach, enabling tools to be optimized, administered consistently, and to meet ROI goals. Security must be done in every part of the business, and that requires a culture shift. “It’s about really knocking down silos,” she noted. “We're now part of the sprints on the engineering team, and they no longer look at us as a separate part of the business. We're part of that conversation, and that takes a lot of love.”

At times developers may get caught up in the mechanics of their work and not pay attention to security threats. Senoff’s team monitors security issues from every quarter, staying up to date on nascent threats.

“We see threats because of the feeds we are getting from threat sources and our tools, but others may not,” she revealed. “But when you start to explain why we're concerned, these are the threats that are facing our company, this is what we're doing about it, and this is where we need your help, it is a much easier conversation because everyone wants to do the right thing. At the point of us asking them for help, it becomes their responsibility as well.”

Senoff identified a consequential new trend in the way security and IT tools are presented and sold. Security products have often been geared toward specific use cases that cover a specific customer segment, or broad solutions.

“The companies that are most successful right now are the ones that really understand the way their partners do their business and ask, ‘How do we build a solution that works the way my customer does?’” she concluded. “Regardless of what industry they're in, they're constantly listening, they're talking to us, and it's become a lot more of a partnership. I used to feel sold to. Now I feel like I'm partnering on a solution.”