At Forcepoint, Rees Johnson serves as the Chief Product Officer (CPO). As CPO, Johnson is responsible for the company’s portfolio, including leadership of all product development, management and innovation, as well as the strategic blending of the total product and customer experience to enable Forcepoint’s clients to succeed.

Johnson plays an integral role in the company’s future success with the development of its Data-first SASE architecture, which helps businesses and government organizations safeguard their data wherever it is accessible. Through this strategic focus, Johnson is helping the company deliver the industry’s first data-first SASE offering, a single unified platform that enables secure access and data protection across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.

Choosing the Information Security Industry

A seasoned expert in security technology, Johnson brings to Forcepoint over 20 years of product leadership in network security, cloud security, and SaaS migration strategy. He also has the unique distinction to have served on the leadership team during the three largest information security acquisitions in the market—McAfee by Intel for $7B, Bluecoat by Symantec for $4.6B, and Symantec by Broadcom for $10B.

Prior to Forcepoint, Johnson worked for Symantec as senior vice president of product management for the enterprise division. In this capacity, he helped convert all products to a full SaaS business model and assisted clients in switching from conventional on-premises goods to SaaS.

He also previously worked at Intel (formerly McAfee), where he held various leadership positions, including senior vice president and general manager of the Content and SaaS Security division, as well as senior vice president of product management for McAfee Labs. While at McAfee, Johnson served as general manager and senior vice president for network security, where he doubled the company’s bookings for intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and helped establish the company as a leader in the category.

Notably throughout his career, Johnson has a strong track record of success across his many product leadership roles, including marquee global brands Symantec and McAfee, in driving product recognition up and to the right of the world’s leading technology analyst firm’s annual product leader quadrant reports, across multiple product categories. And achieving this in what could be considered a record time of just three to four years. A significant talent he brings with him to Forcepoint as well.

Johnson has dedicated his decades as a security professional on the front lines defending corporations, financial institutions, and governments against a genuine and ever-expanding threat that discriminates against no one. He’s served as a strategic security partner to critical infrastructure organizations across the globe, including Polish Telcom in which Johnson helped build back and secure their communications infrastructure from a Russian attack following Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 which destroyed their existing communications infrastructure.

His career has also been greatly enriched though his work with critical organizations that protect nations and economies around the world including the U.S. Department of Defense, UK Ministry of Defence, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and global banks like UBS, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.

Forcepoint

For too long, complexity has served as the enemy of security. And where complexity historically served as job security in the industry, it clearly does not serve the need of the defenders who can no longer manage security stacks of 50+ products that require a team of niche specialists to maintain. With three million jobs available in the security industry today, organizations are looking to simplify and automate security everywhere possible. And this has long been Johnson’s mission for shaping the future of the security industry as well. A shared mission with Forcepoint that helped bring him to the company.

As a result of COVID and the massive move to remote work virtually overnight, every organization on the planet accelerated their journey to the cloud as a matter of critical business continuity need. For many businesses, this was an acceleration of their digital transformation strategy by a factor of up to six years. This also signalled a significant work environment change as many companies have now adopted a hybrid work environment which has some employees remote, others in the office and everything in between. This has created a need for seamless security everywhere an employee is working, regardless of business or personal device type.

Johnson joined Forcepoint at a pivotal moment in the industry, to help the company address this critical and urgent need by organizations across the globe. This resulted in the company’s acquisition of Bitglass in October 2021 to fast track the company’s first cloud-native Security Service Edge (SSE) offering called Forcepoint ONE. Forcepoint ONE is an all-in-one cloud platform that enables security teams to manage one set of policies via a single console for cloud-delivered gateway technologies like Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). For many organizations, Forcepoint ONE is like an ‘easy button’ for security.

Under Johnson’s leadership, the Forcepoint engineering and product teams have been laser-focused on continually broadening and strengthening the Forcepoint ONE platform. In less than12 months the company has launched new features and functionality across three key areas, including:

• Data Security: Added the company’s core DLP policies and engines into Forcepoint ONE enabling consistent protection of sensitive data across the cloud, the web, and private apps, all from one console.
• Network Access: Significant engineering updates to the company’s Secure SD-WAN solution enabling multi-link SD-WAN connectivity integrated with advanced intrusion prevention, visibility and control, and cloud-based SSE security managed at global scale.
• Zero Trust Web Access: Uniquely delivering to clients of the SSE platform innovative Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) and Content, Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) technologies to allow customers to browse the internet and download content with confidence.

A Look towards the Future of Security and Information Sector

Johnson believes that making security simple through a fully integrated Data-first SASE solution with unified data and threat policies that cascade to every threat vector and data loss channel is the future of network security.

Shaping this future is the reality that today’s security fabric is being transformed by hyperscaler platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCI). And these systems’ networks are more robust than anything a single provider could possibly build. Johnson’s eye to the future is developing new solutions that take advantage of these networks to make security more dependable, while also speeding up innovation.

Additional technologies Johnson sees growing in importance the next year is the secure remote access game-changer zero trust network access (ZTNA), or the new VPN, that is revolutionizing security. With ZTNA, organizations no longer have to backhaul to a data center for internet connectivity and at the same time gain more precise authorization of a specific user to an application. According to Johnson, the days of slow VPNs clogging network traffic truly can become a thing of the past.

As cybersecurity truly boils down to what is data security for every organization, Johnson sees data governance and lineage also becoming increasingly more important. After all, understanding where a company’s data is and how to control it is of paramount importance in order to secure it.

Visioning for Operational Excellence 

Johnson believes integrating operational excellence into both the internal organization and the customer experience is the most crucial step in creating a long-term sustainable competitive advantage. Or, in other words, deliver customers the best value security product that is easy to manage and delivered through world class customer support. This has long been a guiding principle for  Johnson and his team. And, he says that he and his crew are having fun working on it!

“Success will be achieved by taking care of and securing customers simply and elegantly.  That is best measured by revenue growth resulting in creating company value.”  – Rees Johnson

Areas of focus Johnson is leading to further optimize operational excellence for Forcepoint customers include:

• Unified threat and data security policies that cascade to all threat vectors and data loss channels
• Integrated SD-WAN and SSE all managed in the cloud to optimize traffic flows for better user experience
• User experience workflows
• Security policies that seamlessly work in the background by default with no worries to the customer (Or, said another way, they just work!)
• Quality innovations and CI/CD automation models to work more efficiently and deliver at digital speed.

With his many years of security experience, Johnson recognizes that making security simpler and easier to manage – without sacrificing any functionality or performance – is a win for everyone, and Forcepoint is on a path to bring this to the industry.

 Leader’s Opinion

What are the key attributes of becoming a successful tech product management and general management leader?

• Employees: Without top talent and a motivated employee base, how can you take care of customers?
• Industry understanding: You have to know what solution the industry needs
• Customer empathy: This is a must.
• Analytical thinking: Utilizing data to inform decision-making

How important is it to have a mentor to grow as a leader?

Critical – and not just one. The best mentor is a good manager and an exceptional HR leader on the same management team.  I’m fortunate to have both.

Other good mentors are actually your direct reports – be open with them about your weaknesses, be vulnerable.  Let them know you know what your weaknesses are, articulate them (they already know) and how you want to enlist them to help you be better.  Empower those who want you to be better the most.

What sort of characteristics in employees contribute to the organization’s success?

Intelligence, initiative, and kindness. I want brilliant team members who like to get work done.  But if I hire with just those two characteristics, the culture can be too rough and attrition begins to happen. You can’t keep talent over time. Add in kindness with those two characteristics, and you have an amazing culture.

What is the best way to build a great team? 

Understand what motivates employees and lean in.  I believe what motivates most engineers most is:  mastery and autonomy.  Engineers want to master their domain and new domains and generally just want to have the autonomy, with the associated culture and tools, to perform.  As a leader, I embrace Jim Collin’s view, ‘I need to be humble and have strong professional will’.

What does “performance culture” mean to you?

Ultimately, it means winning in the market. But that takes time to climb that mountain. It took four years with the IPS business at McAfee to break from the pack in the market. It took four years in my lab role to emerge from a failing security effectiveness model to market leading.  No big satisfying wins happened with a year or two of work that I’ve been a part of. The wins I’ve been a part of usually take around four years and a ton of work.

A steady culture of setting and realizing quarterly goals in a transparent way that also facilitates teamwork when joint goals are needed.

Create a scalable culture so performance can be amplified by:

• Hiring and retaining top talent
• Empowering them with an accountable and a somewhat autonomous governance structure.
• Create a process of interlocking with those governance teams to help keep the strategy clean and the execution strong.

What advice would you give to the next generation of tech leaders?

Enjoy and seek change. New tech waves will continue to come. Here at Forcepoint, we’re integrating a unified data-led SD-WAN/SSE concept all managed by the cloud – we are leading that change in the market to empower our customers with simplicity.  Last, make friends along the way.

Website: www.forcepoint.com