New Venture

It's good to be back blogging...the last time I posted I worked as a Customer Success Manager for a DNS company. Since then, I have ventured to the CDN world, with the added mix of Cyber Security, WAF.

Cyber Security is a true passion of mine and after nearly 10 years in this space, I love seeing how the industry and technology place has progressed and also ironically, stayed the same. I have enjoyed seeing the likes of Jane Frankland prosper in the field and be truly recognised as a thought leader with 'Women in Security' and her bestselling book 'IN Security'. Over the last few years I have met some truly amazing people, connected through the Women in Leadership platform which introduced me to a range of great individuals that broaden my knowledge into work places, diversity and pushing your own voice.

Customer Success (CS), as a function is and should be the core of any business, concentrating on retention, relationship, client advocacy, project managing client lifecycle and upselling.
 When I was thinking about leaving my previous post, i spoke to a few companies on CS roles, i found that the role had evolved in the industry. It goes without saying that every role means something different, depending on the company but overall CS has turned into implementation, support, subject matter expert, renewals, upsell, healthchecks etc. However doing this for a large volume of accounts, which, in my opinion, is not scalable and the CS individual is doing 3 peoples jobs (and getting paid for one person) therefore an avenue that i wanted to go down.

After taking a good look at the industry that has served me well for 10 years and the experience from working for small and larger companies, I came across Fastly. A dynamic and new age CDN and to compliment that, is the WAF (Web Application Firewall). It is always a difficult decision to know what company you should move to and even though CDN technology has been around for some time, the way that Fastly do it is different; more importantly their support relationships with clients and being an integral part/extension of their clients infrastructure is amazing. It's early days for me here, but the way they respond, acting agile, making adaptions for clients on the fly is something that I haven't experienced before.

Don't worry, no sales pitch from me, nor will I go into detail about how Fastly are different...if you're interested then take a look at the website.

As an Account Manager, my goal over the next few months is to get out and meet clients, health checks and make sure I understand how the client works and make sure utilisation is there. I will also be attending as many industry conferences, Women in Tech/Dev/Cyber events etc.