Leading Change: Women in Cybersecurity With Danelle Daley

Tyler Podcast Episode 50, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and Content Marketing Director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

Cybersecurity is a fast-paced, important industry with few women leaders. As we celebrate our 50th episode, we sit down with Danelle Daley, a trailblazer who is transforming this growing field. Danelle is the vice president and general manager of Tyler's Cybersecurity division. Guest host Rikki Ragland and Danelle dive into why there aren’t a lot of women in cybersecurity and discuss how a shift is occurring that could change the landscape of cybersecurity leadership in the future.

Transcript

Danelle Daley: I've actually coached a few young women who worry what should I do? This is what I want to do. And my advice is it doesn't matter what path you take into cybersecurity. The key is that you have that kind of mind that enjoys, loves, is passionate about the math and sciences.

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech podcast, where we talk about issues facing communities today and highlight the people, places in technology, making a difference. My name is Jeff Harrell. I'm the director of content marketing for Tyler, and I'm so glad you joined me. Well, cybersecurity. It is a hot topic and very exciting industry, but it's tended to be fairly male dominated. Well, why is that? Well, today we dive into that topic with guest host Rikki Ragland. Rikki is the manager for media relations here at Tyler, and she will talk to a true trend setter, Danelle Daley. She is the vice president and general manager of Tyler's cybersecurity division. They're going to dive into this topic and uncover many more in this really fascinating conversation. Without further ado, here's Rikki Ragland's conversation with Danelle Daley.

Rikki Ragland: Well hello and thank you for joining me on the Tyler Technologies podcast. I'm Rikki Ragland filling in for Jeff Harrell today. And I am very excited about our guest today. With me is Danelle Daley. She is vice president and general manager of Tyler Technologies cybersecurity and is a complete trailblazer when it comes to technology and cybersecurity. Danelle, thank you for joining me.

Danelle Daley: Oh thank you, Rikki. My pleasure.

Rikki Ragland: Now I know that you have been at Tyler for 25 years and you have seen a lot, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. One thing I would like to know though is how many women do you usually cross paths with in your industry of cybersecurity?

Danelle Daley: Oh, that's a great question. I can tell you that the most recent statistic that I saw was that only 24 out of every hundred cybersecurity jobs are filled by women, and it gets even smaller if you talk about our white hat folks, the people that are actually trying to help the companies with their security and that's like less than 10% of our women.

Rikki Ragland: Well, why do you think it's still such a male dominated industry in 2022?

Danelle Daley: So if you look in general, the industry is fairly young itself. We really did it when I started in the eighties, we didn't even really have cybersecurity as a degree or a career. It was just getting started. If you think about it in the 1990s, I think is when they started the first antivirus product to be available to load onto PCs. And then in the two thousands is where we really started to see cyberattacks ramp up and multifactor authentication was created and things have really started. But that's really in the last 20 years. So it's a fairly young industry in itself.

And I think there are two reasons why women aren't taking as many positions as they should. I think it's a combination of awareness. So just being aware over the last 20 years that this was a career that you could actually do and then being encouraged. So women also weren't encouraged to go into a lot of math and science roles 20 years ago. We're seeing that change, which is awesome. I know that there are many, many cybersecurity groups for women now, if you go to LinkedIn or you go to Facebook. They didn't even exist I don't think 10 years ago. There were a lot of women groups for cybersecurity, but there are groups now that specifically target women where women can share information and strategies and help each other. So that's great.

 

About Danelle

 

Rikki Ragland: Given your longevity here at Tyler, what led you down the cybersecurity path when it came to your career?

Danelle Daley: I worked originally on one of Tyler's first hosting teams. So when we started, Tyler had its own cloud 20 years ago, and that was fairly new for our client base at that time. And so I at that point was part of the ERP division. And we decided to offer a hosted service software as a service, a SAS. It was called SAS and it's been called multiple things over the years. But basically we knew from the beginning that to get clients to entrust us with their data, that we had to take security very seriously. And so it was built into our offering and our infrastructure and our network from day one.

And that was our primary goal was to make sure that it was secure, to the point that we actually had a separate network from Tyler. So as we were trying to get clients to come on board, we would say, this is separate. Tyler employees can't even get on this network unless they work for me, unless they work in the hosted team. So we had a complete separation there. And then we made sure that the whole team, the network team, the server people, that we made sure that we kept up to speed on what was happening in the industry as far as new technology, as far as new products to help secure the environment. It was a lot of on the job training and a lot of on the job experience.

Trends in Cybersecurity

Rikki Ragland: As you talk about the evolution of cybersecurity at Tyler and just in general, that's a word that we're hearing more and more of. Cybersecurity, whether we're watching the news or we see it on the internet. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in cybersecurity as it relates to all of us just as the general public?

Danelle Daley: So the nice thing, as far as people on the personnel side, definitely seeing people going remote, so you can have a cybersecurity career from anywhere. So that's awesome. On the technical side, as you're probably hearing in the news, we're seeing a lot more ransomware. And I think the reason why we're seeing a lot more is there were a bunch of high profile cyber attacks in the early two thousands. And I think what's happened, and this is a little bit of my opinion, but a little bit of what I'm reading as well is that the really good hackers have figured out that they could spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to pick the pocket of the big, big companies. But those companies are investing a lot of money to protect their environment. And all of a sudden they're realizing, well I can get $500 million from this smaller company or I can get a hundred million, or I can get $500,000, and 10 of those is just as good as going after that big fish and these little fish, they don't have sophisticated security programs.

They don't have the protection in place that the big guys do. So it's a lot less effort for them, I think, and they've realized they can still make a lot of money. Or they can make a splash if they're not going after the financial part of cybersecurity and they're more going after trying to take a stand. They've figured out with the smaller companies and the smaller orgs that they can overtake their websites and get their message out. So I think that's probably the biggest trend.

Rikki Ragland: And as you talk about those trends stemming back as far as 2000, so we're going back 22 years. What are some of those significant changes you've seen in the industry to try to remain in lockstep of some of those trends that are happening?

Danelle Daley: Yeah, so that's the funny thing is that the industry has been evolving quickly and as fast as bad actors have been discovering new ways to attack. And so these bad actors have really taken advantage of the amount of time it takes the industry to roll out the products that they developed. And we're seeing in the current environment, the big charges towards AI or artificial intelligence and having products that learn a lot about your ecosystem, your whole network and what normal looks like. And then when they see something that's not normal, they report it. As opposed to having someone program look for A, look for B, look for C because that's what we know the fingerprints look like from these bad actors. Now, on the other hand, they're looking at it from a different point of view, which is learning about your environment and then learning what's unusual. So trying to get ahead of those bad actors, as opposed to seeing their fingerprints and putting them in the database.

Advice for High School and College Women in STEM

Rikki Ragland: And it seems like with so many changes, obviously, that would encourage people to start looking more into that cybersecurity industry as we were talking about on the career side, I know that with science, technology, engineering and math or STEM, a lot of those programs are in place. And a lot of young women are pursuing those STEM programs. What advice do you have for college women and high school age young ladies who are interested not only in STEM, but really taking that STEM experience and making that their springboard into a cybersecurity career?

Danelle Daley: That's a great question. I've actually coached a few young women who worry, what should I do? This is what I want to do. And my advice is it doesn't matter what path you take into cybersecurity. The key is that you have that kind of mind that enjoys, loves, is passionate about the math and sciences. A lot of times people say you're either math, science, or English history. I don't think you have to be one or the other, but certainly when I was young, I loved math and science. So I've always had that analytical bent in that. I enjoyed doing games and I enjoyed doing puzzles and I loved solving problems, even in my interpersonal skills. I love to help people. And so as long as you, if you're a STEM degree and then you're looking at your first job, what you want to do is some type of IT is great.

It can be networking, it can be user administration. It can be like I said, server, DBA. It doesn't really matter. The key is that you're learning some part of the ecosystem and then you challenge yourself to learn other parts. So you don't stay in a silo when you have to interface with the developers of the programs or you need to do an install of a new tool, that you're taking the extra time and energy to really understand how it works overall, not just in your little world that you deal with on a day to day basis. And the more you learn, that makes you a better cybersecurity professional. Then you bring all of that learning and education and I guess that passion for solving problems, that passion for figuring something out.

A lot of these attacks haven't happened before. No one knows what they're going to look like ahead of time. So it's the thrill of the chase. You want to chase that down the rabbit hole and find out how they got in or where they put their fingerprints. And so any path to get you there, any path that allows you to learn about your technical infrastructure, your network, your ecosystem, is really a great start for a cybersecurity career.

Overcoming Obstacles

Rikki Ragland: Yeah. I'm fascinated by cybersecurity myself. So I do wonder though, as you start talking about the advice for young women and where you've been in your career, certainly there must have been some obstacles or challenges that you faced that you had to overcome, especially as a woman in this male dominated industry. What were some of those obstacles and how were you able to get around those?

Danelle Daley: Well, I think the biggest obstacle was having a mentor who really could coach me, who understood the challenges that are I would say unique to a woman like having children and having to deal with breastfeeding them in the morning or the afternoon after work. And how to deal with those challenges while also working. And there weren't a lot of women that you could choose as mentors. I think that's definitely increased, but I also think that now that we have all these ways to connect remotely and through the internet and through these, it's really not an issue anymore. It was an issue for me, but I think that we've worked around it in this day and age. And I encourage everyone to find a mentor so when they're feeling particularly challenged, they have someone who can at least pat you on the back and say, yep, you're right, this is hard, but here's a way you can deal with it and move on.

Rikki Ragland: I'm glad you mentioned mentors because I think when people get a mentor, they don't realize that it really is for the longevity of their career. I know that for myself, I still call my mentors that I had 25 years ago when I was stepping into an industry. So to be able to still lean on them, just the importance of that long term relationship between mentor and mentee.

Danelle Daley: I was just talking at lunch about a mentor that I've had since 1986 and we still talk.

Rikki Ragland: Exactly. And then to pay it forward or I should say, pay it backwards and to become a mentor yourself. And I think that, to me, seems to be one of the most rewarding things is to take that knowledge that you learned from your mentor and then to be able to hand it back to another mentee.

Danelle Daley: Yeah. And I can tell you, it can be anything from joining a team at work. Like we have an app challenge for high schoolers in the state of Maine. And they send a note out every year to the people at this company and ask who wants to participate in that program. And we get as many women as men or girls and boys, high school kids that we help with that. But even starting that program was something I was part of back, I think we're probably on year 10 now I'm guessing. Somewhere in the five to 10 range, but being part of starting something like that. We recently started a DEI group. So diversity equity and inclusion group, and that's not just for people of different races and colors, it's also for women. So that's been great as well. And I think that participating or even starting a group is really something that you never know what you're going to get out of it. And it's been wonderful. It's been a wonderful experience for everyone involved.

Cybersecurity Misunderstandings

Rikki Ragland: That's great advice. I do have one other question for you just about the industry itself. What do you think is one of the most misunderstood perceptions of cybersecurity?

Danelle Daley: I think probably I mentioned white hat hackers earlier. I think that a lot of people think if I want to go into cybersecurity, I've got to be a hacker. I have to know how to hack into the school's grading system or I had to have been some computer genius when I was in high school. And again, it's not the case at all. Here I am leading a cybersecurity division and we didn't even have that as an option when I was going to school. So it's definitely not necessary.

Rikki Ragland: That's a very good point. Where do you think this industry will take women let's say five to 10 years from now? Where do you see the role of women in cybersecurity?

Danelle Daley: So I think in five to 10 years, you'll see a lot more women in leadership roles because as we start, like I said, if we're at 25% of the people, we probably don't have a lot of people in leadership. That's even more rare. I think that will continue to grow. And I think a lot of the things that women are traditionally known for like what you do at home with raising a family, manage a family, managing different situations, new situations, staying calm in a storm. I know if you have kids and they're young and they're six years old and they fall and cut their head open, you have to quickly figure out whether you're going to go to the emergency room or whether it's something you can deal with at home.

When they're older in high school, you're trying to figure out how to get them to all their practices and to get their homework done and feed them. And those multitasking skills and those decision making skills are actually strengths when it comes to cybersecurity careers. Being organized and being able to assess a situation and determine what's critical and what's not, and what's normal and what's not are going to help women really succeed and grow. I think it's going to grow tremendously. I think that there's going to be a lot more women. I hope in five to 10 years, we're at least 50%.

Rikki Ragland: I would agree. Hopefully. Is there anything that we have not covered that you would like to add?

Danelle Daley: Probably the only thing I would say at this point is if you are thinking about a cybersecurity career, to see if you can intern or even shadow for a day and find out what it's all about, because it may surprise you. And I can tell you if you do like STEM, if you like anything in the STEM world, you might enjoy it. I'm guessing you probably will. So that would be the only additional thing I would recommend is some type of shadow or some type of internship or exposure. So you can see how much fun we have every day.

Rikki Ragland: You as always have always been a joy to talk with. And I know that we could continue to go on and on. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us today on the Tyler podcast.

Danelle Daley: Thank you, Rikki.

Rikki Ragland: This is Rikki Ragland again, filling in for Jeff Harrell.

Jeff Harrell: Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. A true trend setter is Danelle. Really enjoyed that. Well, thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech podcast. We have a new episode dropping every other Monday and have lots of great topics planned throughout the rest of this year. So please subscribe to the podcast. Again, my name is Jeff Herold. Big thanks to Rikki Ragland for hosting this week. I'm sure you'll hear more from Rikki in the weeks and months ahead. And again, Jeff Harrell, for Tyler Technologies. We'll talk to you soon.