Cohesity today announced the appointment of James Blake as Field Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Cohesity in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Blake will play a key role in consulting on how organisations can bring the worlds of data security and management together and build an optimal cyber resilience and recovery strategy orchestrated by a single data management platform. 

The security veteran has spent much of the past two decades building the end-to-end preventative and detective cyber operations capabilities for the world’s largest physical retailer, technology company, software house, logistics company and oil company along other organisations. While in this role he was hands-on with customers, dealing with incidents and the impacts of a lack of resiliency, including wipers from nation-states and ransomware attacks, Blake was also one of the co-founders of the Security BSides London conference and was the inaugural chair of the National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Information Sharing Partnership.

Before joining Cohesity, Blake was the CISO at Rubrik. Prior to Rubrik, he was the Advisory Chief Information Security Officer for ServiceNow. In both positions he engaged with C-level at FTSE 100 and FORTUNE 100 organisations, helping build and deliver strategies and concepts about improving effectiveness and efficiency of cyber resilience in today’s operating environment.

“Cyberattacks and ransomware are top concerns at the board level of most European organizations and I am thrilled to have James Blake in our team who will bring his deep security expertise to our EMEA customers,” said Matt Waxman, Chief Solution Officer, Cohesity. “His experience gives James the necessary background to understand the operational issues and constraints within customers in different verticals and work with C-level executives as a peer to develop pragmatic solutions. He can consult customers, prospects, and partners to help build an effective cyber resilience and recovery strategy.” 

“Having dealt first-hand with multiple ransomware and wiper attacks, I realised enterprises held the advantage when they had strong impact mitigation preparedness and a close relationship between IT and Security both in terms of teams and platforms”, said Blake, EMEA Field CISO, Cohesity. “A data security and management platform like Cohesity brings together the data from today's diverse compute and storage environments and allows organisations to implement a data-centric cyber resilience to impact reduction."