Jackie McGuire of theCUBE Research sits down with Matt Radolec, VP of incident response, cloud operations & SE EU at Varonis, at RSAC 2025 for a conversation on the future of cybersecurity. Radolec shares fresh perspectives from his keynote, emphasizing how the industry must rethink talent development and data protection amid growing complexity and threat volume.
Drawing on his deep incident response experience, Radolec discusses why bridging the cybersecurity skills gap demands bold ideas, such as tapping into the gaming community. They also talk about including AI-driven security strategies and the creative ways companies can better defend sensitive information in an evolving threat landscape.
Automation and AI aren’t just optional anymore — they’re vital to reducing organizational risk, Radolec argues. Radolec pushes leaders to think differently about cybersecurity workforce training and innovation by offering actionable takeaways for organizations seeking smarter, faster and more resilient security postures.
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Matt Radolec, Varonis
Jackie McGuire of theCUBE Research sits down with Matt Radolec, VP of incident response, cloud operations and SE EU at Varonis Systems, at RSAC 2025 for a conversation on the future of cybersecurity. Radolec shares fresh perspectives from his keynote, emphasizing how the industry must rethink talent development and data protection amid growing complexity and threat volume.
Drawing on his deep incident response experience, Radolec discusses why bridging the cybersecurity skills gap demands bold ideas, such as tapping into the gaming community. They also talk about including AI-driven security strategies and the creative ways companies can better defend sensitive information in an evolving threat landscape.
Automation and AI aren’t just optional anymore — they’re vital to reducing organizational risk, Radolec argues. Radolec pushes leaders to think differently about cybersecurity workforce training and innovation by offering actionable takeaways for organizations seeking smarter, faster and more resilient security postures.
VP, Incident Response, Cloud Operations & SE EUVaronis
Jackie McGuire of theCUBE Research sits down with Matt Radolec, VP, Incident Response, Cloud Operations & SE EU at Varonis, at RSAC 2025 for a conversation on the future of cybersecurity. Radolec shares fresh perspectives from his keynote, emphasizing how the industry must rethink talent development and data protection amid growing complexity and threat volume.
Drawing on his deep incident response experience, Radolec discusses why bridging the cybersecurity skills gap demands bold ideas, such as tapping into the gaming community. They also talk abou...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
that makes gamers particularly well-suited for careers in cybersecurity?add
What is the concept of filling a skill gap as a leader and how can it be likened to leveling up in a video game?add
What is Varonis using AI for in their security analyst team and product offerings?add
What is one of the reasons for the speaker's long tenure and satisfaction with Varonis?add
>> Welcome back to RSAC 2025. I'm Jackie McGuire, Practice Lead and Principal Analyst for Security at theCUBE. Hope you've been learning a lot. Today, I am here with Matt Radolec, he is the VP of Incident Response, Cloud Operations & Engineering for Varonis. Thank you so much for being here.>> Thanks for having me on your show.
Jackie McGuire
>> Awesome. I know you've been, how many times have you been to RSA?>> Oh, I can't even remember. Probably let's say six or seven.
Jackie McGuire
>> Okay, all right. Do you remember what your first year was?>> Maybe 2019.
Jackie McGuire
>> Okay. I think I'm about the same. This was my fourth or fifth I think, so I don't feel like a new kid anymore.>> Yeah. You've been here enough times that you have places you like to eat.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, and I know which place is North, South, East, and West.>> Yeah. Which one is Moscone North and Moscone South, yes.
Jackie McGuire
>> It's always fun when you think you know where you're going, and then you hit Mission and you're like, "I have taken a wrong turn somewhere.">> This isn't where I parked my car.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, I also learned which hotels are at the top of the hill and which ones are not, because one year, I think my first year I accidentally booked a hotel at the top of the hill and then decided it would be walkable because it was only half a mile, so that was fun.>> Yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> All right. So you actually gave a keynote last year, right?>> Yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> On preventing AI breaches, and then you were just saying we were both commiserating, the opposite of commiserating. What would that be?>> Celebrating?
Jackie McGuire
>> Celebrating.>> Yeah, we were celebrating.
Jackie McGuire
>> We were celebrating that we actually get to do this for a living, because you're doing another keynote this year, right?>> Yeah, I am. I'm really excited. My keynote last year was on reducing the blast radius of AI, really drawing to the fact that a lot of people don't really realize how much data AI can access, and it's a lot more than you might realize. That's the premise of AI is if you get data security, there's a lot of benefits, but if you get it wrong, there's a lot of risk. But this year, I'm going in a completely different direction.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah?>> I'm talking about the cybersecurity talent gap.
Jackie McGuire
>> Okay.>> And how I really feel that gamers are the most untapped talent pool in the workforce and are ripe for cybersecurity.
Jackie McGuire
>> That's interesting.>> And then we celebrated a little bit about gaming too, so I know I'm sitting across from the gamer.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, I'm a little bit of a nerd. I was your typical latchkey kid so since the first Nintendo and Atari, I've been babysat by video games most of my childhood, and now I have two pre-teens and a teenager, and we all play Fortnite together.>> We're all gamers.
Jackie McGuire
>> I definitely think there are lots of studies that show correlation between intelligence and gaming.>> Yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> So tell me, what do you think it is about gaming that makes people especially suitable for cybersecurity?>> There's a couple of things. One is gamers love to strategize, so they want to come up with a plan to take down the boss, and they're also really adaptable. I think of shooting games, you have to be good with all the weapons.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> Or RPG games, you have to play the different classes. You are not always a healer or a tank or a damage dealer. There's all these quests that you have to do, so gamers also love this sense of achievement. And so as a leader, if you learn how to use those skills and that drive, you can really get a lot out of gamers. Also, gamers love to hustle. I mean, how many people do you know that could say they binge-gamed all night, right? Now, you just have to, it's our job as leaders to figure out how to make work feel that way, and give your employees this sense of accomplishment or give them a quest to do, and you can get a lot out of gamers as a result.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, it's interesting because I think we often think of the internet generation as being wired for rapid stimulation, but now that you think of, when you mention that, I think we call it getting sweaty in Fortnite.>> Yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> Where gamers usually are really good at investing in something, an outcome, even if it means running all the way across the map.>> Right.
Jackie McGuire
>> The other thing is in a lot of games, so I play Fortnite, which I bring up, you have to work with strangers.>> Right.
Jackie McGuire
>> And sometimes you have to work with strangers you can't even communicate with.>> Communication skills, nonverbal and verbal communication skills, or even in games where you're alone and you have to learn how to solve problems on your own and make decisions on your own. I think all these things, again, if channeled the right way, can help people make great employees, and as long as also you recruit gamers and make them realize that there's the work time and the gaming time, and it doesn't bleed over too much.
Jackie McGuire
>> Well, and there's also a natural path to engineering. I was sharing with you that during the pandemic, I got bored and decided to build a music festival in Minecraft.>> Yeah, and you were on ESPN.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, I got an ESPN eSports interview. That was pretty awesome.>> I haven't been able to do that.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, I mean, I have to say that it was also with, oh gosh, I'm going to blank on his name now, he's a big MMA commentator, and I was a huge MMA fan. Anyway, but yeah, so I think one of the interesting things to me with building that festival is I had to learn server architecture because Minecraft servers, you host your own servers for Minecraft or you pay a server company so we had to actually learn, and I was a data scientist. I had only ever used Python really.>> Right.
Jackie McGuire
>> And so all of a sudden I'm knee-deep in AWS architecture and syncing servers and creating API listeners to connect my ticketing platform to, and I guess thinking about it's probably gaming that made me like, "All right, it's just another challenge that I can accomplish, right?">> Well, and it sounds like you also built a community, right?
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> One other thing that I've seen success with recruiting gamers is you can build a community of gamers and give people way outside of work to connect with each other and build relationships, which gives them stronger team dynamics at work. I mean, if you're playing Call of Duty with someone after work, you got to work through all the communication issues that you have pretty quickly.
Jackie McGuire
>> Or you get to virtually shoot them, I guess.>> Right. A little bit of a stress relief maybe.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah. Sometimes why I like playing with my kids, so I'm like, "I'll just take you in a video game and whoop your ass.">> Yeah, there you go. Better than the kinetic version.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah. All right, so that's interesting. One of the things that I've heard is that there's not necessarily a skills gap, I guess there's not a talent shortage as much as there is a skills gap.>> Correct.
Jackie McGuire
>> Is that it's that most critical security functions need experienced security people, but there's a lot of very green security people rolling out of boot camps and colleges that don't have that practical experience. Do you think there's an opportunity to gamify tier one SOC analysts?>> That is entirely what my talk is about. The talk is called From Gamer to Leader, and the principle really here is that we as leaders have to create that skill gap, how to fill that skill gap. It's a lot, and I'll use this analogy in my talk, if you play World of Warcraft or you've ever heard of an RPG game where as you level up, you get talent points to spend. You start as a lowly level mage that can cast basic spells, but at the end you can summon an elemental or something like that and you are adorned in fire the whole time. It takes a lot of questing and a lot of leveling up to get there. Well, it's our job as leaders to build that quest line, to hire these people that don't have certain skills and give them the experience or the objectives to build those skills. And sometimes it's time, sometimes it's maybe a capture the flag exercise, or some type of cyber war games type of an event, or going to a training or training classes. Other times it's simply research projects. I can't tell you how often I'm running into organizations that have brand new at Kubernetes or at cluster and node management and their security people are like, "Well, that's not a server, but it's a server, but it's temporary. But how do I get events from something that doesn't exist anymore?"
And I'm like, "Well, let's start to think about that problem and how you're going to solve for that." And I think giving that type of a quest to a person is going to allow, just like you did with this architecture to create your Minecraft server, you learned a lot about AWS as a result of that. We have to create those moments.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> It's our job as leaders to give people that path to achieve and level up and grow, and then you can reap the rewards at the end. The other thing though, I think is it presents an opportunity to, is to give them the right tools. If you spend any time on the show floor, everybody's got an AI powered toolkit. Well, that's like a mythical sword that you're going to give to your employees to make them better at their job. And if that helps them ask the right questions and develop those skills, everybody wins.
Jackie McGuire
>> Otherwise, they just become like the impact grenades in Fortnite.>> Or NPCs, right? They just run around and run their heads into the walls and don't really get anything accomplished. Nobody wants any NPCs on their team.
Jackie McGuire
>> I work with those people.>> Yeah, don't be an NPC.
Jackie McGuire
>> That's actually one of the jokes between my husband and I is we'll be walking through the grocery store or something and somebody will just do something exceptionally rude, and I'll be like, "Fricking NPCs.">> Right, or when you see someone that's having a lapse and I'm like, "Oh, their controller disconnected."
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, right, you need to recharge those batteries. I love this, and I'm thinking about a thousand different ways we can use this because it's funny, when I went to the Pima Community College has this Cyber Warfare center in Arizona, and it's amazing. And these kids are so excited, these college kids, they are just passionate about what they do. Then you walk in a SOC and you talk to a tier two, tier three analyst, and they look like they've been beat with a baseball bat.>> They're just worn out.
Jackie McGuire
>> And so, yeah, I think if we could take more of the gamification into the security with these young, energetic kids that are still, and it's more of the thrill of the chase than the grind of 10 million unanswered SIEM alerts.>> Yeah, but it's also incentive, right?
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> We need to move the incentive to closing the most alerts or being the most accurate or finding a threat. We need to reward the things, and again, create that quest line where at the end of it, they get some kind of benefit from it. I've even seen companies that give out Legos or badges or coins. Doesn't always have to be money, but money's a great way to incentivize a lot of people.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah. Well, at DEF CON, you always have a badge that you're incentivized to visit all the different villages.>> All the booths, exactly.
Jackie McGuire
>> Because you can either solder stuff onto it, you activate different parts of it. That's really interesting, okay. So other than gaming, let's see, I guess what are you, I don't want to say agentic AI and you can't say agentic AI.>> All right.
Jackie McGuire
>> Other than agentic AI, what do you hearing the most from CISOs now? We covered the talent gap, and I think that's definitely something we need to address. But beyond that, what are you hearing from your CISOs that you interact with every day? I imagine you have a pretty unique perspective being in charge of incident response.>> For sure. There is a balance between enabling the business to adopt AI. We won't say agentic AI, but AI tools in general, but also using AI for defenders. And they're trying to say, "Well, how much of my time should I be spending preventing an AI breach or a breach caused by AI versus equipping my teams with the things that they need?"
I always talk about the battle of the robots, right? You got to use AI to fight AI or you're lagging behind. I also think that there's a growing compliance concern because you're now building models and training models that you could be non-determinative, or it could be crossing geographic boundaries with the particular types of information. So there's a lot of privacy conversations that are happening around things like, "Oh, could I mask the data, the sensitive stuff so that I could maybe cross a geographic boundary with that data? Or do I have to rebuild the model in multiple places so that my employees of a global company can consume that?"
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> So there's a lot of conversations happening around that, but I mean by far, everybody still cares about a data breach and is trying to avoid a data breach.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> Everyone I've talked to is concerned that there's too much data, it's getting shared in too many places, and people have too much access to it, and they want to avoid a data breach.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> Nobody has extra time or extra resources to be able to tackle that problem, and so they're looking for innovative ways to solve for that, or ways to avoid explosion of cloud costs and cloud consumption without the benefit, but also without changing their risk portfolio.
Jackie McGuire
>> I was just talking to one of the executives at a company who was talking about, "Oh, you were just saying cloud costs." I think that's one of the interesting things with AI is that there is this kind of, what I always worry about is what happens when my red team AI and my blue team AI start fighting each other, and my Amazon bill is the thing that pays the price.>> And Amazon wins.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah. Oh, yeah. Amazon absolutely wins.>> They win the whole time, yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> I will give them a shout-out that when I was a data scientist, I made a $75,000 Kibana mistake, and they did eat it for me.>> That's very nice of them.
Jackie McGuire
>> It was, I think we were spending enough at the time that it seemed like a good idea. But yeah, it's one of those things that I think people keep asking me in analyst briefings when I'm doing analyst briefings where people asking you about, I'm like, "I have companies that can't even get all their firewall logs in the UTC." I have companies that don't even->> Or don't even understand the concept that the logs are happening at the same moment, but the time stamps are different.
Jackie McGuire
>> Different, yeah.>> They're different, and then they're in multiple time paradoxes trying to figure out an incident. Go ahead.
Jackie McGuire
>> Or they don't know that GoIP, most SIEMs pull it on query so if you pull a log, it's going to give you today's GoIP.>> Correct.
Jackie McGuire
>> Not when it was ingested.>> But that same thing for host name resolution.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yes.>> So most of them are going to give you the host name that the IP has right now, not the one it had at the timeframe of the event.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> Then you're chasing down, you're just chasing ghosts the whole time.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> I'll give you another, you asked a question like, "Well, what else are people talking about?"
Another one I get asked a lot is how are the breaches happening? What is right now, last two weeks, top incentives that you see? There has been a shift. I think when years pass, we would talk about attackers breaking in zero day exploits, very, very targeted and crafty phishing ruses or masquerading as members of the help desk. Now we see them logging in, right?
Jackie McGuire
>> Yep, stolen credentials.>> They're harvesting credentials, they're reusing credentials. They're not even guessing passwords with a brute force attack, they're just buying them on the dark web or even finding them, there's so much available for free now, and then they're simply reusing them. You think you have this ultimate defense with MFA, but it's not everywhere all the time where people can succumb to MFA fatigue attacks. The problem that they're exploiting is that a regular user has access to enough to monetize for a breach. So now instead of being worried about this thing that's going to make your SOC light up like a Christmas tree, you've got to find someone that simply reused their password somewhere, an attacker that logs in as them accesses information and exfiltration information using normal user means. They don't drop any code, they don't escalate any privileges. They send themselves that email on Gmail, or they use your own exchange to send the-
Jackie McGuire
>> They geo spoof so it looks like they're where you are.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, they geo spoof so it looks like where the person is, and it's so easy to find out where people are.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> Right? Instagram or whatever type of social media, just a little bit of effort to do some layers of obfuscation. That's the number one threat that people are facing is the impact of one user account getting compromised. Yes, certain companies, you still need to worry about APTs and nation state actors. I can't say that the banks-
Jackie McGuire
>> You're a utility, you should be worried about PRC.>> Yeah, or a big bank, right?
Jackie McGuire
>> Or a bank.>> This is not to say that's not where your top threat actor is.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah.>> But the average company that comes to RSA, you need to be worried about password reuse. You need to be worried about how much someone can get to with a Copilot or an agentic AI in your environment.
Jackie McGuire
>> Right.>> And how much data that exposes, and yes, also these other threats, but focus on the things that are likely to happen and likely to be impactful because the regulators don't care.
Jackie McGuire
>> Yeah, that's true. I guess that brings up a good next question, thank you for teeing it up. What's going on at Varonis? How are you helping customers address this right now?>> Yeah, so first and foremost, and I've talked a lot about the gamification of things. We have an AI security analyst that helps our analysts, and you actually have to be better than the AI analyst to stay an analyst at Varonis. You have to be more accurate and faster than the AI analyst is in order to maintain your career status on our managed detection and response team. We're using AI for good. We've also put AI into our products from doing AI-based classification. We also have an AI-based search for natural language querying. These things are all helping people to protect their data in more places. But a big part of what we do is we are tackling this data security problem with automation. We collect the right ingredients to be able to do things like reduce that blast radius, or what I talked about before. We'll find where a company has sensitive data, we'll find all the ways that it's exposed, and we'll use automation to actually reduce that exposure safely. That's the thing that people think is impossible, but it's because we collect every transaction that happens on data that we know if we make this change, who would've been impacted by it? Do we need to put them in a group or change that entitlement ever so slightly so that when we revoke that global access we still preserved the access that was needed? That's really the magic behind it all. We have companies that, I just was in the UK last week, big pharmaceutical company. They had remediated 3 million files in their Office 365 environment and did not get a single help desk ticket in the last six months.
Jackie McGuire
>> Wow.>> Right? That's real outcome. That's a tangible reduction in the amount of data that was accessed without disrupting their business.
Jackie McGuire
>> So more of a scalpel approach, but if you're really smart, you could do it at->> But if you do it at scale, you could do it a lot at once and you can use a lot of-
Jackie McGuire
>> You can make->> Yeah, exactly, and you can do it with a lot of automation. I also think that there's this concept of, well, where do I start? One of the reasons I've been at Varonis almost eight years and why I like it so much is we start with an assessment. We'll actually give companies the visibility of where is my data and where is it at risk as a free POC, because you're going to choose to move forward with us because you want to fix it and you want to monitor this data set all the time. You want 24/7 eyes on your data, you realize it's your most critical asset, and you realize that you don't want findings fatigue. You don't want to buy a product that gives you 50,000 help desk tickets. You want something that actually delivers the remediation to the risks that you find, and that's what we're good at, that's what we're known for.
Jackie McGuire
>> I was going to ask another question, but I actually think that's probably a great place to leave it.>> Awesome.
Jackie McGuire
>> Because I think that's probably the punctuation at the end of what Varonis is getting really right, right?>> Yeah.
Jackie McGuire
>> Awesome. Well, Matt, thank you so much. What time is your keynote? Please let everybody know.>> It's at 11 o'clock on Wednesday.
Jackie McGuire
>> 11:00, Wednesday.>> It's From Gamer to Leader, and some people might say that I'm opening for Magic Johnson, but I'm going to say that Magic Johnson is closing for me.
Jackie McGuire
>> I mean, I will buy that. I will tell everybody I know that.>> That's awesome, thank you.
Jackie McGuire
>> All right. Thank you so much for being here, Matt.>> Yeah, it was great to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
Jackie McGuire
>> All right, thank you guys so much from RSAC 2025. We are live with theCUBE. This is Jackie McGuire, and we will be back shortly with more news and insights. Thanks, everybody.
Jackie McGuire