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Adam Lomas
Senior Cybersecurity, IT & Risk Leader (CRISC, CCSK) and Customer Trust Advocate | Business Partner to Enterprise GTM Teams in Regulated Verticals | Shaper, Problem Solver, 15+ Year Tech Veteran.
Adam Lomas is the Director of Information Security & Privacy at Formstack. His role involves overseeing the company's information security strategies and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. Lomas is active on LinkedIn, where he engages with professionals in the cybersecurity and software development sectors, sharing insights and participating in discussions related to governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC).14
Lomas has a background that includes certifications such as CRISC from ISACA, indicating his expertise in risk management within information systems. He is based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and has previously worked with Managed Risk Partners.23 His LinkedIn profile can be found under the username adamplomas.2
Highlights
☁️💸 I sold 3 Fortune 100’s their FIRST public cloud based SaaS a decade ago. (I’ve worked directly with well over a dozen Fortune 500’s as my customers at some point in time.)
A compliance obsessed European logistics giant with €19B EUR annual turnover flew their most senior IT auditor to Toronto a few years later to learn how I was building trustworthy SaaS.
Then just last year we were selling a mission critical 6-7 figure deal to the entire global IT architecture team of the world’s largest cosmetics company and they didn’t ask about security topics.
Not once.
What changed? 🤔
We’ve come a long way since the early days of SaaS and the cloud. The public cloud SaaS model is ubiquitous and enterprise procurement teams have (mostly) learned effective ways to evaluate and manage risk.
I don’t get questionnaires intended to cover software used in on-prem AS/400 servers anymore and most customers are capable and happy to review a CAIQ.
We have critical mass of widely understood industry best practices to reference and be measured against and sufficient competence in all parties involved that reliable assurance is possible here.
Procurement/legal teams and their contracts have (mostly) caught up such that cloud relevant accountability topics are properly covered and either accepted as standard or smoothly negotiated.
But the root of that shift from a painful, protracted buying process in 2014 to a no questions asked, “shut up and take my money” six-figure ARR enterprise sale today is the EASE and SPEED we can build one thing:
🤝 Trust.
I didn’t have prefilled questionnaires or an SSAE-16 report in 2015 and even if I did my buyer stakeholders couldn’t understand them.
So they didn’t (literally COULDN’T) trust us.
We fought to build shared understanding with key IT, security and procurement stakeholders in that account until trust was earned.
We got better at presenting our posture so when the logistics company opportunity came along they were skeptical but intrigued… curious enough at least to invest in an expensive on-site audit.
We ultimately proved we had both the capability and believability to be trusted, but it took lots of one-off efforts to make our case. Not scalable.
Later we sped through the global architecture review at the cosmetics company because we:
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understood the questions they would have and the assurances they would need,
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made those easily accessible for interested parties in our Trust Center (powered by SafeBase) and;
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made sure the right people on the buyer’s side were reviewing these as early as possible.
Result?
SILENCE from the customer’s security team on EVERY technical call in the buying journey. I was speechless myself…
Trust in Cloud Providers in 2024 is built with transparency. SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. GenAI or LLM or not. It doesn’t matter.
Without trust, there’s waste.
How has Trust helped or harmed your buying (or selling) journey?
(Image generated by DALL-E, an AI tool developed by OpenAI)
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