CYBERFORCE Profile Series: Scoring Big as a Trusted Advisor to Customers

This is the second in a series of blogs featuring a Palo Alto Networks CYBERFORCE Engineer and the business challenges they tackle. CYBERFORCE recognizes the best-of-the-best from the NextWave Partner Community; proven partner engineers who put the customer first, are trusted for their security expertise, and focus on preventing successful cyberattacks.

Meet Arien, CYBERFORCE Hero #012

Arien Seghetti, of WWT, likes being a trusted cybersecurity advisor to his customers. He understands their challenges and how they need to protect their organizations amid the ever- changing threat landscape.

He also likes winning deals – maybe even more than scoring soccer goals. The former semi-pro soccer player has worked almost 20 years as an IT network engineer, but his passion for security is more recent.

He credits Palo Alto Networks for that.

“For the past couple of years, Palo Alto Networks has fueled my drive for security and helped me advance my security expertise,” he says. “When I started diving into what Palo Alto Networks firewalls specifically provided, that got my juices flowing to be more focused on cybersecurity overall and how much I could further my own security skills. Now I'm looking at going for my CISSP certification in cloud security, so Palo Alto Networks and CYBERFORCE really ignited my passion for security.”

Helping Clients Make Intelligent Decisions

A common challenge his customers face is not knowing which applications are on their networks and what their users are actually interacting with.

“Often the security side of the house is ignored,” Arien says. “When I come in with Palo Alto Networks, I’m able to give customers that visibility and those data sets and data points they can utilize to make intelligent decisions. I can get a proof of concept up in about seven minutes, so within eight minutes, they’re seeing real live data on their network.”

Arien counts on his collaboration with the Palo Alto Networks team to show customers things they haven’t seen before.

“After a large energy customer had been running a competitor for many years, I came in with a Palo Alto Networks engineer and won the solution,” he says. “We pitched the whole platform to them, and they loved the platform story. We could show them in a matter of a few minutes how quickly this solution is superior.”

Seeing breaches make headlines over the last few years fed Arien’s passion for security even more. “It’s really ignited me to dive into it,” he says. “I want to be that trusted advisor for my customers who don't have the time to figure it out. I can say, ‘Did you think of this, this, or that?’ And they're like, ‘I didn't even think of this, let alone this or that.’”

Recognition Designed for Engineers

As an engineer, Arien says he wants to continually know the technology better, and the CYBERFORCE program helps him do that. “We’re in front of the customer, and our word means a lot to us,” he says. “The fact that I could say, ‘Yeah, I'm a CYBERFORCE Hero,’ is pretty cool among my peers.”

Arien encourages his colleagues to join CYBERFORCE, telling them, “It’s everything you do. Security Lifecycle Reviews. Proofs of Concept. Just make sure you’re doing your own and registering them.”

While it’s fun to be known as a CYBERFORCE Hero among his peers, Arien says it’s more important to be recognized by Palo Alto Networks. “I am a partner, not one of their SEs,” he says, “and the recognition shows all my hard work is valuable to them. When you’re part of a partner program that calls out your successes and says you’re just as much a partner as their sales staff, that’s really nice.”

Something else he likes about CYBERFORCE? “It doesn't feel like a marketing program,” Arien says. “It feels like it’s from engineers. That's really the standout part of it.”

This CYBERFORCE Hero inspires confidence – and for good reason. Check out Arien’s distinguished stats, certs, and skills in his Hero video.

Learn more about joining CYBERFORCE.