Today, we close out our “A Day in the Life at Armor” series focusing on the people behind Armor’s success and how they work every day to meet clients’ needs. Throughout this series, we’ve learned how members from Armor’s compliance, Threat Resistance Unit (TRU), and customer experience teams operate to effectively secure our clients—and that’s just scratching the surface.
For our final blog in the series, we talk to Kevin Chiang, senior product manager for Armor Anywhere and Armor Complete, about how he helps clients understand the features that Armor’s software offers, while also providing feedback to Armor about the improvements they would like to see in the platform.
Tell us a little about yourself and what you do for Armor.
As a senior product manager, I help run the Armor Anywhere and Armor Complete products. As you may know, Armor Complete is a hosting solution that provides security and compliance for those transitioning to the public cloud. My job is to develop a partnership with the customer so that we can gain more insight into what they want and need from us.
What’s your average day-to-day like?
Every day is different. Usually, though, I’m in meetings to learn where we are in the product delivery and to understand the different features we want to integrate into the product. I’m always trying to understand customers’ requests for new features and teach customers how to use our products if they’re experiencing pain points. I also have meetings to learn how to best strategize in the future—for example, developing better bundles or a stronger focus on security.
What one word would you use to describe your job? Can you expand on why you chose that word?
If I had to use one word to describe my job, I’d say prioritization. There are so many different areas and opportunities to go after. You have to understand the company direction and strategy to know where to focus. You take all the feedback you’re getting from sales support, customers, and internal stakeholders, and then try to figure out where to invest your time and resources. Ultimately, the goal is to improve our company’s product set.
Time is always the biggest constraint. I lean on my team to make sure they are empowered to make their own decisions and that I’m not a bottleneck. It’s important that I’m a part of the right conversations at the right time.
What problem do you help Armor customers solve?
Our customers are often struggling to understand their security and compliance issues, and how we can help them protect themselves. There’s a lot of education involved, because the customers have to understand what each metric means, where their vulnerabilities are, and how they can take action against them. When you give them visibility into the metrics we use, you have to explain to them what each one means and how they can use them. They have to understand how to become a more secured company with more secured products.
Security and compliance is a very serious topic, but it’s such a broad landscape that many customers don’t know where to start. When customers come to Armor they’re trying to piece the solutions together themselves. They see that Armor has already thought through a lot of these things, and that we’ve taken care of bundling different services together. We take care a lot of things that customers would otherwise have to do for themselves. Where we really shine is our security operations center (SOC), which looks at logs and activity to better protect our customers as well.
How do you support cybersecurity and Armor’s mission as a company?
As the cloud landscape evolves, it becomes more and more important for Armor to understand customer behavior. We need to be able to recognize normal and abnormal behavior. That’s difficult because once customers go to the cloud, we lose direct contact or insight into them.
Log Relay, one of the features we launched in June, allows customers to send us logs from their different devices. It can help bring Armor into the conversation to get better insight into what the customer devices are telling them. This is where Armor really has an opportunity to shine as it continues to mature over the next few years. It allows us to increase our intellectual property to understand normal customer behavior. When we know that, we’re able to make more accurate recommendations for our customers.
Where do you see the industry in 5 years?
The easy answer is that the industry will continue moving toward the cloud. We’re seeing the movement right now, but I think it’s just going to continue over the next couple of years.
We will also probably start seeing more hybrid cloud solutions. Companies want to diversify. They don’t want to put all their workloads into only an AWS or Azure or GCP. Companies will likely use a mixture to hedge some of the risk and take advantage of certain tools/pricing as cloud adoptions continue to mature.
One of our challenges, as Armor matures, is to learn to work well across integrated cloud solutions.
Kevin’s group serves as a vital two-way conduit between Armor and our clients. Their in-depth understanding of Armor’s platform, new features, and strategy allows them to educate and inform clients about what Armor can do for them. At the same time, their close contact with clients gives them insight into how our platform needs to evolve to serve their needs more fully. Kevin’s days are full of this continual communication with product developers and users, which provides the foundation for great service, strong relationships, and ever-improving product features.
To learn more about how our teams are working to protect you—or, can be working to protect your organization—contact us today.