We’re honored to welcome seasoned identity security go-to-market (GTM) leader Howard Greenfield to the Silverfort team. Bringing decades of experience in both cybersecurity and GTM leadership, Howard is equipped to bring our company to new heights as we deliver the first end-to-end identity security platform to customers. To learn more about Howard’s professional background, read the announcement.
For this blog, we sat down with Howard to learn more about his vision, leadership approach, and what’s ahead for the company, our customers and partners, and overall strategy.
What drew you to this role at Silverfort and why?
I was drawn to Silverfort for multiple reasons, several of which are related to the main drivers of success in any business: team, TAM, and timing. The team: we have strong and engaged executives, investors, and employees committed to growing our business while preserving and scaling Silverfort’s unique company culture. The TAM (total addressable market): we have an unbelievably large addressable market that transcends barriers like company size, region, and industry.
This leads me to timing: “Identity” is now at the forefront of every cybersecurity team’s priority list, and Silverfort’s approach is distinctive. Our approach to identity is security-first and leverages unique and powerful technology, which complements what’s already in the market to enable our 1,000+ customers to take their identity security initiatives to the next level. Identity teams and security teams now overlap in multiple regards, all trying to figure out quickly how to better address identity security as it becomes a board-level discussion and concern.
Lastly, Silverfort has reached rare levels of success – specifically relating to hypergrowth, strong customer retention and satisfaction, and a winning culture full of people who genuinely care about each other and value collaboration to accomplish shared goals.
What is your vision for the company in the next 2-3 years?
Building on my last answer where I mentioned pivotal shifts happening in the identity space, here at Silverfort in order to address key issues associated with identity security we launched new products like Privileged Access Security (PAS) and Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security, which together with our other products create the broadest identity security offering in the market.
These additions shifted our company from providing a few main value propositions to an end-to-end platform approach. Now as an identity security platform, we’re focused on being well-versed in not only how our technology works, but how it’s actually implemented and used day-to-day to make our customers’ jobs easier while making their organizations more secure, and providing the insights and trends for customers to make better and faster decisions. It’s the difference between delivering solutions rather than just product features and functionality.
We are going to continue growing the business fast, expanding our customer base and bringing more value to our existing customers. Silverfort has already grown faster than other companies around us thanks to great product-market fit and execution, but I see major opportunities to improve and accelerate even further. Silverfort is well positioned to take the lead in the identity security category and build one of the largest companies in cybersecurity.
Regarding our partner and consulting community, we’re all in – I see an opportunity to expand and grow that ecosystem even more. We’re going to expand our programs and empower partners to be the trusted advisors that identity and security teams rely on to achieve success.
Why identity security?
We’re at the forefront of cybersecurity for multiple reasons:
- Identity plays an increasingly bigger role in the market space – but between remote work, hybrid and complex environments, growth of interconnectivity, AI and more – getting a handle on the overall state of your organization’s environment is very difficult for most companies. To not only be compliance- and governance-driven, but also to be security-driven, requires looking at all dimensions of identity. No other company besides Silverfort understands every identity spanning from on-prem Microsoft AD all the way through to modern cloud-first architectures – we meet customers where they are and where they plan to be, all at the same time.
- Identity security is currently pieced together with point solutions. Some solutions focus only on detection and posture, others on specific elements of enforcement. Some focus just on non-human identities, or only privileged users, or just the cloud. Others offer identity security as a feature that is part of a broader offering, but don’t address it fully or deeply enough. Customers now seek a more unified approach; a platform focused on identity security end-to-end. It’s needed not only for better security, but also for cost reduction and consistent user experience.
- AI is coming in hot and fast – we’re addressing AI identity security in a very innovative way that will help companies adopt agentic AI without worrying about AI agents accessing the wrong things or doing damage.
- In the old days, identity security was just a ‘feature’ in the identity infrastructure. That was a reasonable approach when companies only had a single identity management solution. But now that enterprises manage their identities in various on-prem and cloud environments separately with different vendors, there’s a need for a dedicated security platform that can see and protect all these environments. We’re bringing the security arc over all of it, and there’s now a massive opportunity to shape what true identity security looks like and help our customers thrive.
How would you describe your leadership style, through the lens of being our President and CRO? How does that translate into shaping high-performing GTM teams?
It’s my job to equally satisfy and serve three distinct groups: employees, investors, and customers. Everything we do and deliver needs to have a meaningful impact across all three assemblies. Being that cybersecurity is a highly competitive market, along with the fact that identity is now at the center of modern security strategy, we need to keep raising the bar to deliver winning results to all stakeholders.
To achieve that goal, I want us to be a team and a company that will do anything to win while still having the moral compass to choose the right path. Of course, winning doesn’t come without risk, and we need to find the areas where we’re willing to place bets and execute flawlessly.
How do we make that possible? I am a big believer in giving teams lots of runway to build their business with flexibility but at the same time providing overarching pillars as a foundation. I want to ensure teams get the right insights so that individuals can do their jobs effectively while ultimately achieving corporate north stars.
How do you see our relationship with customers evolving under your leadership?
Open, ongoing communication with our customers about their feedback, priorities and the actual value they gain from the platform is key to realizing our vision, driving growth, and shaping the roadmap. I also want to be part of the evolution of customers’ maturity, meaning that we partner with our wider ecosystem (partners, consultants, technology alliances) to provide guidance. We want our customers to trust us to guide them on their entire cybersecurity journey, showing them how there are solutions we partner with that maximize a customer’s chances of achieving security and resilience.
Now that Silverfort has evolved from offering specific products into a platform, being in the position to provide a singular GTM vision will empower us to focus on how we solve problems, which will positively impact the way we develop and deliver solutions. Our wider team, including myself, will stay close to customers and partners to keep advancing our platform forward and therefore the entire identity security landscape.
How do you plan to foster collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer success?
This is a huge benefit for me in that Silverfort doesn’t need much help in that arena, and I’m just excited to add to the momentum. I recently spent time with our Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Customer Officer, and I saw firsthand how our level of collaboration is solid and only getting stronger. We all agree on what’s universally important as a GTM engine and how we need to incorporate process, enablement, and insights so that we’re all moving in the same direction. I’m looking forward to helping the teams get even more aligned on our shared goals and helping each other be successful.
Any message you’d like to share with the team, customers, or partners as you begin this next chapter?
I’m thrilled to keep building and growing together while having fun along the way. Thank you for the opportunity to be part of Silverfort’s continued growth and success, the sky is the limit for us and I can’t wait to experience what’s ahead with all of you.
Welcome to Silverfort, Howard
With Howard’s years of experience and strategy-minded approach, this decision is a benefit to both the Silverfort team and the wider identity security community. Interested in learning more about Howard’s experience and recommendations for the identity security space? Connect on LinkedIn to get the conversation started.