Ryan Liles, master of technical diplomacy
Cisco Talos is back with another inside look at the people who keep the internet safe. This time, Amy chats with Ryan Liles, who bridges the gap between Cisco’s product teams and the third-party testing labs that put Cisco products through their paces. Ryan pulls back the curtain on the delicate dance of technical diplomacy, how he keeps his cool when the stakes are high, and how speaking up has helped him reshape industry standards. Plus, get a glimpse of the hobbies that keep him recharged when he’s off the clock.
Amy Ciminnisi: Ryan, you shared that you are on the Vulnerability Research and Discovery team, but you work in a little bit of a different niche. Can you talk a little bit about what you do?
Ryan Liles: My primary role is to work with all of the Cisco product teams. So anybody that Talos feeds security intelligence to — Firewall, Email, Endpoint — anybody that we write content for, I work with their product teams to help get their products tested externally. Cisco can come out all day and say our products are the best at what they do, but no one’s going to take our word for it. So we have to get someone else to say that for us, and that’s where I come in.
AC: Third-party testing involves coordinating with external organizations and standards groups. You mentioned it can be difficult sometimes and you have to choose your words carefully. What are some of the biggest challenges you face when working across these various groups? Do you have a particular method of overcoming them?
RL: The reason I fell into this role at Cisco is because of all the contacts I made while working at NSS Labs. The third-party testing industry for security appliances is like a lot of the rest of the security industry — very small. Even though there’s a large dollar amount tied to it in the marketplace, the number of people in it is very small. So you’re going to run into the same personalities over and over again throughout your career in security. Because I try to generally be friendly with those people and keep my network alive, I have a lot of personal relationships that I can leverage when it comes to having difficult conversations.
By difficult conversations, I mean if we’ve found a bug in the product or if a third-party test lab acquired our product through means not involving us and did some testing that didn’t turn out great, I can have the conversations with them where we discuss both technically what was their testing methodology and how did they deploy the products. If there were instances where we feel maybe they didn’t deploy the product correctly or there’s some flaws in their methodology, being able to have that kind of discussion with a test lab, while not frustrating them, takes a lot of diplomatic skills. I think that’s the biggest contributor to my success in this role — being able to have those conversations, leaving emotion out of things, and just sticking to the technical facts and saying, here’s what went wrong, here’s what went right, let’s figure out the best way to fix this. That has really contributed to how Cisco and Talos interface with third-party testing labs and maintain those relationships.
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