#103, GM EMEA @ Google Cloud Security, Cristina Pitarch: Keeping Google Secure

0:00the Google that you joined. What was that company like at that time? I used to describe it when the people were asking me how it's working in Google. I said, it's the Disneyland of the jobs. I just kind of like, I was sometimes amazed that they were paying us to work there.

0:23As you know, we have been really fortunate here at the Tech Leaders Podcast to feature some of the world's top female tech leaders, plus some of the world's top thought leaders in the cybersecurity space. Well, today, we have another outstanding guest lined up for you who actually ticks both boxes. Google Cloud Security are pushing the boundaries of innovation within cloud security globally and are the backbone that provides protection for all GCP services. Christina Pittard is the general manager for EMEA. Growing up in Madrid, Christina followed an unconventional path into technology. She began her career as a qualified lawyer, but was soon drawn to the allure of the tech sector.

1:04After spending four transformative years at Salesforce during a critical period for that company, she has not looked back since. Christina is now in her 13th year at one of the world's most influential companies, Google, in one of their most dynamic areas, security. In this episode, we discuss Christina's unconventional journey into tech. Her experience studying in the USA, the cultural differences between Europe and North America. We also explore the legendary culture of innovation at Google and how it continues to evolve today. And Christina shares key principles of Google's security strategy, offers advice to ambitious women looking to cultivate a career in the tech space, and so much more.

1:50This is a brilliant episode with an inspirational speaker and leader. Christina Pittock.

2:03So, Christina, I'm so glad to get you onto the Tech Leaders podcast. How are you today in sunny Malaga? I'm really, really well. I think, like, enjoying the summer. Yes, and why not? As the listeners may be aware, we've interviewed the brilliant Helen Kalisky from Google Cloud before we've interviewed other people from Google generally and Alphabet generally. But obviously, you are the general manager for EMEA of Google Cloud Security. You know, I mean, there's so many things we can talk about. Security is such a hot topic right now and for good and bad reasons. Before we start, Christina, we always ask this question to get going.

2:41What does good leadership mean to you, Christina? Well, I mean, I think like, and this is a very, how do you say, hot topic now after the football Europe. No, I think it's a great example about leadership. Like you can have it from both the bad and the good ways. For me, a good leader means a person that can take the best out of the team. And that knows what are the weaknesses, what are the strengths, and that can play with them, but also can grow the team into being something better. So if you just play with what you have, like you say, you're a leader and you have a fantastic team, but you haven't done anything for them or you're not helping them to get one, then you're not a good leader.

3:27You just have a very good team. Of course. Yeah, of course, I understand, yeah. So do you mean in terms of prioritizing the development of your team so that they can achieve their goals, essentially, and getting in, we call it getting the trenches with them. So basically, you know, helping them on a day-to-day. Yeah. Helping on a day-to-day and knowing them, which I think is very important. Of course. Knowing very deeply what do you have. You know, I get very frustrated sometimes when a leader doesn't really see the potential of somebody. And then you see that person moving somewhere else and being amazing.

4:04And you're like, it was not that person, it was the leader. So I do think that that's a very, very important part of leadership. I wanted to give the listeners a little bit of an introduction to yourself. So can I ask you, can you tell us a little bit about your early life, Christina, and where you grew up and right up until sort of university period? I was born in Madrid, but I lived all my life in a small town close to Madrid called Aranjuel, which is beautiful and has like a castle and a river and everything. Brilliant place to go. somebody wants to visit after I studied in Madrid but I I studied law and business administration which it might sound surprising coming from an IT leader right and uh and yeah I think like that kind of like small town girl mentality made me uh travel the world I mean at the beginning it was Yes, yes.

4:59You know, because I don't think many people at 16, 17 know what they want to study. I had no clue. And that was something that somebody told me, look, if you don't like it, then you can really do a lot of things with it. So I understand you did a stint in the USA. You went to business school in California. Is that true? So can you tell us what you learned from that experience and how that shaped you? I studied in Berkeley. I think like, again, that was a change in my life completely. because I decided to leave everything I had behind, like friends, a boyfriend at that moment, everything to just kind of like go and have an experience and a dream.

5:40And it was shocking. At the beginning, even like you might think like English now is not that good. But when I went to California, I was close to zero. So I was going to university, going to classes and the teachers would be asking me questions and I didn't get a word of what they were saying. So I have to adapt to a new country. I have to adapt to a new language. I have to adapt to a new way to study. And that, I mean, I think I grew like probably five, six years in six months. Coming from like being super protected, like always with family, always with friends, to just alone in the world. But at the same time, also give you many skills because you realize that nothing is that difficult, you know?

6:24You can survive in a foreign town. Yeah. Well, I've got to ask you this, because obviously you're a proud Spaniard. What was the biggest cultural shock for you living in the US? Because I'm assuming you hadn't lived abroad before, before that experience. What was the biggest cultural bombshell in terms of living in California? For me, everything was a shock. From there, from, yeah, I mean, like little things like... No siesta. I don't know, you see, we, like in Spain, we tend to kind of like always dress up very much. and I saw the people going with like, always like the flip flops and the sports clothes everywhere they were.

7:00And I was like, no, you're going for dinner, get something. It was very interesting. And then the directness on the communication, that was something that shocked me a little bit as well. I come from Spain where we say what we think and then you go to America where they tell you everything is fantastic and then it's not. And I had to read between the lines. Like, so what are you telling me? Is this awesome? Is it good or is it not good? Yeah, yeah. It's a bit more superficial in the US, isn't it? It's a bit more, yeah, I totally get it. You end up working for Salesforce. Talk us through what Salesforce, the Salesforce that you joined in, was it 2007-ish?

7:44What was that company like? And what was it like joining such a well-known, established tech giant like Salesforce? So when I joined, it was not like that. It was pretty small, you know, like I was actually the first rep that joined the team to work in Spain. So I was working from Dublin. Of course, 2007. Yeah, I suppose it was quite small then, wasn't it? I didn't think about that. Yeah, it was amazing. Like you imagine, it was like we were all in an office in Dublin. We were around, I don't know, probably 50, 60 people all from all countries in Europe. And we were all young. We were very hungry.

8:21We all wanted to learn. and it was a very constant competition, but fun. You know, they put us against, and I made amazing friends who constantly wanted to beat each other. They had a culture of promoting people pretty quick if you're good. And I remember in Salesforce, I got promoted three times in a year and a half. So the motivation is incredible. And we were all like, I mean, it was not only me. It was like my group of friends were all dying to do the best, to get the best results. And I think Salesforce was amazing in creating that environment. It is funny because the majority of the people that started with me in 2007 are still there.

9:07And now they're all like RBPs and something like that. Yeah, absolutely. So was it like a sales role then? Were you targeted to engage with new prospects about potentially selling Salesforce CRM system or their software? So cold calling, like the most brutal sales role in the world. That's the way to learn, isn't it? Yes, where, you know, we have certain numbers to do per day, like number of calls, number of people that answer you. And they gave us really good training, which I think like still serves me to date in terms of like sales skills, how to write an email, how to focus a call. and then it was just you on your phone and there you go, you know, go for it.

9:52Yeah. What did you learn from Salesforce as an organization that you took into your, and I want to put a spin on this in terms of your leadership style and things like that. What did you learn from, we've established it wasn't a massive organization when you joined it, but it was clearly a growing organization. What did you learn from that culture which you took forward? Motivation. Like as a leader, and my first leadership experience was in Salesforce, what they offered me that possibility. they did they had it very clear that sales is a motivation game and that you need to find what motivates every individual some people motivates gets motivated by money some people by promotion some people by success whatever i said for what's excellent on knowing that at an individual level what were the next steps and where would you go and how would they prepare you to go there so it's the framework for developing people who want to achieve like creating a meritocracy i I think creating a meritocratic environment so people who want to excel can excel and can be supported towards excelling and getting the most out of themselves, essentially.

10:56Is that kind of encapsulating what you're saying? Yeah, that is exactly it. And then I think creating always next steps. So it was very clear how you could actually have a 30-year career in that company. And there was no time, at least when I was there, in which you would feel I have nowhere to go. I do think that's so important, like that companies put time into building that career path. Yeah, it's about progress. People need progress, don't they? And it's not necessarily about money or even job titles. They just need to have something which represents, you know, that you are working towards a goal and then you are a little bit better or a little bit more advanced or a little bit more learned than you were yesterday.

11:39I think that's ultimately what it is, isn't it? So tell us a little bit about, I know you had a stint with an ETL software company, and then you ended up at Google. So talk us through the Google that you joined. What was that company like at that time? So through that period in your life of joining Google. I used to describe it when the people were asking me how is to work in Google. I said, it's the Disneyland of the jobs. I just kind of like, I was sometimes amazed that they were paying us to work there. I mean, it was amazing. I think like 12 years ago, I joined Google Cloud when Google Cloud was non-assistant.

12:16So we were kind of like a team, again, a team of people, 30, 40 people that were trying to do our best to develop something that nobody really cared about. It was absolutely incredible because the feeling of accomplishment, you will see very clear whatever you were doing, what was the impact of it. we had a huge room to experiment i tend to think like for example i am a very or i like to think i'm a very creative person and i'm constantly come with new ideas like oh let's try to do these things i never had anybody saying to me no don't do this like every time i was coming to my manager i want to do this he was like okay do it go for it sometimes i fail sometimes he was but it was absolutely but it was it was actually encouraged so we usually had 20 what we call a 20 project where you could dedicate yourself to something that goes deep to your heart and it maybe didn't have anything to do with your job maybe like i was working in cloud and maybe i had a passion for you too so i wanted to do something with you too so yeah all that things were encouraged creativity was at the maximum it was a time of like everybody was saying okay test fail but if you fail fast and recover and keep on.

13:35So as really, we were still very young people. As really young people, a lot of recent graduates, this was a whole experience of how to, and it teaches a lot on how to put things to leadership, like data driven projects. You wanted to defend that what you think was correct, it was the right thing to do. So I'll put you an example. I decided at one point that I wanted the support team to also start or trying to sell certain products. So we have to do a test and we have to kind of like A, B test some teams doing it, some teams not doing it to see like if the support team was happy doing it, if they were wasting too much time, if our customers were happy or like that.

14:22And then you have to put all that data together and present it to the leadership. and kind of like trying to sell them that this would be a fantastic idea. And as a junior person in the company, that opportunities are amazing. I don't think many other companies will give you that chance to present your ideas to like really high leadership. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. That's kind of like quite legendary now, isn't it? Well, what I mean is I don't think anyone before Google was, obviously loads of companies encourage innovation but very few at that time at least would kind of legislate for it and what i mean is it's actually formally put that into the working week that you are required you are required to go and be innovative and think outside of the box and i understand that google pay came from that yeah you know other products as well google maps maybe even i can't remember but it's yeah obviously there's uh there's so many products that have come out of Google over the last 20 years.

15:24Gmail, for example, came from that. Wow, did it? Okay, well, that's incredible, isn't it? So you joined in a partnership, and it was a sales role, I'm assuming, though. My first years in Google, we're doing support, technical support. Ah, right. Okay, so you joined in a support role, and then it seems like you moved towards sales then. You were missing it so much, you had to go back to it. Came back home, yeah. You've obviously excelled in every role you've had. Where does this drive come from? What drives you what are you looking for here i think like i'm not easily satisfied i'm pretty um and i always laugh at myself because sometimes you just need to take yourself with a bit of humor uh but every time i'm like oh i want to get promoted and i want to go to this place and i want to really get this and then i fight for like i don't know how long to get to this place and the night after i get it I'm already thinking how to get to the next one.

16:17And he's like, can I give myself a day to rest and enjoy what I achieved? But no, and it is not in a bad way because it's not something that stressed me. I think the other situation will stress me more. The fact of like not knowing where to go, not knowing how to move. I am, as I said, I like to look at certain very high dreams and go for it. My experience is that nothing is impossible. And a lot of people have said to me, yeah, you won't get there. Forget about that. I don't forget about it. I keep on. Yeah, no, absolutely. So let's quickly talk about the sales element of your role then and your move towards Google Cloud.

17:04Because you joined Google and then you went across to Google Cloud, yeah? Yeah, no, I joined Google Cloud. I moved to big Google and then I joined back Google Cloud. So I have done like a full 360 degree cycle.

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18:05So how did you move towards the security side then, Christina? And can you talk us through how you ended up on that path and what drew you to that direction, the Google Cloud Security? Because it's a very specific thing, isn't it? So why did you move towards that? So it's kind of like, again, another funny story. And it was just by chance. So I was one day on the Dublin office and then somebody came to visit from the US office and I was the most senior person on the office at that time. So they asked me, would you mind actually giving a tour to this guy that just came from US? He's part of Alphabet.

18:45Nobody really knows what he's doing, but he's coming to see the Dublin office. Would you mind giving him a tour? So I went and I met this guy, which was the founder of the security company at that time called Chronicle, which was part of Alphabet. So it was kind of like a separate company, but part of Google. So he explained me his project. He told me what he was doing. He said, we are creating a security offering that is going to change the way that the world does security. Like, I mean, yeah, he gave me a pitch. You know, I was like fascinated after one hour of talking to him of like, wow, this, I had no idea about security.

19:25Never look at it. But immediately after talking to him, I was like, this is fascinating. So I offered him my help. I started actually working on the contracts for Europe because, you know, I have a legal background and they didn't have any person legal. So as that 20 % type of project, I started helping them. And then after a couple of months, this guy told me that he was looking for a leader to open security practice in Europe and that he wanted me to do that. Yeah. I was a bit shocked. Again, that was not what I was looking for. or like I was happy where I was, but I thought it was a great challenge.

20:05And I joined. It's certainly a growing sector, industry. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not going away anytime soon, is it? Cybersecurity. And it's certainly, obviously, in light of the growth of Google Cloud is becoming more and more important. The security aspect. So you think about this security four years ago when I, so I joined as the first person in Europe. So at the beginning, I was like one of these orchestra men. I did everything. I did support. I did legal. I did PR. I did engineering. All the things. I was the only person in the company. So I went to a lot of companies to speak about security.

20:43And this is only like Google customers then. Yeah, well, customers are like, just talking. I wanted to see what was the feeling in Europe on the main customers about security in general. And you cannot imagine the amount of times that I got told security is not a priority, or we don't have any problem with security, or we're not going to spend anything in security because we haven't had any problem in the last five years. So the visibility of it was close to none. And then suddenly in the last four years have exploded, which is great, because at least now, it's not that at that point they didn't have any attacks.

21:24Yes, they didn't. No. At least now everybody's aware. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So what would you say are the core principles of the Google Cloud security strategy? So, I mean, I think our mission is to actually provide to companies, governments, and with the same security tools that Google is internally. And I think that that simplifies it very well. But considering that we are a company that has so many billions of customers, security is a huge priority internally for Google. And we have learned how to do it in a way that we think it could help the world. It is a battle that we are all fighting right now.

22:08And if we can provide with a way to make it easier, then I think that we will be actually achieving the mission that we have. Can you give us some insight into how you ensure the sort of security and privacy of your cloud customers then? So we are not. What we keep on trying to think is like majority of the companies right now are moving to cloud environments, right? And then in the cloud environments, security is something that is shared and it should be transparent and it should be not complex. Security industry traditionally had been extremely fragmented. Every company would have to deal with, let's say, 340 different security providers to secure like tiny pieces of their business.

22:56What we are trying is to offer a platform that will actually secure majority of your business without having to kind of like move providers for like this tiny business. And then you see security as a whole with simplifies and like avoid people having to overwork. Because again, we do have a huge problem in security. There's a huge problem of a lot of noise. it's a lot of players not enough people to do the job and kind of like not enough and a lot of technology and yeah so we take all the three things, we make them in one and we are trying to solve that It's a really good answer, I think it seems that Google Cloud is obviously kind of a challenger a challenger at the moment to AWS and Azure but it appears you are obviously making gains on that, you know, you're you're capturing market share.

23:54What sort of trends are you seeing in cloud security, in this cloud security landscape right now? Is there, what's happening in the industry right now from a security threat standpoint? Well, I mean, as you see, the latest right now is how AI is going to influence security. And both to defenders and to offenders, or the bad and the good guys, you know. Yeah, blue team and the red team. So basically, AI is something that personally I see is coming to help us to defend ourselves better. But at the same time, it's also giving the bad ones different way to doing things. So we do need to adapt very quickly and being very ready to that new world that is coming.

24:46And the only way that we can adapt is using AI. So it's use AI to fight AI. You have to, otherwise you'll fall behind, I suppose, don't you? And I think Google are probably one of the best positioned vendors in terms of the amount of data that you guys have. I think you're probably very well armed to benefit from AI innovation, AI technology. So, yeah, again, I think the difference between defenders and offenders is companies like Google, which are obviously trying to help the good ones, They have such a huge amount of data and AI and LLM models are based on data. So the more data you have, the better models you can build.

25:29So absolutely, if you put that reasoning together, then you realize that we do have an advantage because that amount of data the hackers don't have. Yeah, sure. So what advice do you typically give to GCP customers then to improve their security posture? Do you advise your customers? Yeah. I'm assuming you probably do. What are the top pieces of advice you typically give? I understand it's very general and every company is different, but can you give us just some top tips sort of thing? So, I mean, obviously I think when a company is thinking about moving to the cloud or moving more workloads to the cloud or starting, so either companies that have right now starting working on cloud or that have been working for a while, security should be first and foremost.

26:17And I've seen a big change on that. But four years ago, all the transformations to cloud forgot about security. And they come later and they actually start thinking about it when sometimes it's too late. So my main advice is always like make security a part of your project from design. and make sure that for the moment that you are thinking on moving certain parts of your business to the cloud, you have a big point in which you talk about security and in which you think, how is that going to be secure? Obviously, GCP, and I don't say, it's not I say because I'm from Google, but it is an elder data.

27:04It's the most secure cloud and is the one that has less vulnerabilities by the numbers that have been put publicly. but it's always neat to think because in security, we always say it's not, you know, it's not about if it's going to happen. It's about when and how you're going to react to it. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's really good advice. The thing is with it, Christina, it's just such an evolving picture, isn't it? And there's new threats coming out all the, like there's new threats emerging all the time. And I think it's staying up, staying on top of those threats, which is the challenge, isn't it?

27:39Are there any innovations or updates or anything that is in the pipeline right now that you can potentially talk about? Well, I mean, I think like I was saying, the use of AI is going to change the way that we use security. And basically in Google Cloud, we are embedding AI to all our products. And that makes a huge difference because the amount of data that you can process right now and, you know, it's like the needle in the hack, how to find it. now the amount of data we can process and how quick can we actually make sure that we are not giving fake alerts that is the right thing. It is going to help, or it's helping already the teams that are overworked, like looking constantly at fake alerts and constantly at things like when you are fine-tuning these processes to the point that maybe is reducing that noise from like before eight hours of work to now maybe 1.2 seconds.

28:38the impact that this is going to have in the security world is going to be huge so for me that is probably the main innovation is starting now but we are seeing we are constantly testing you know and testing different scenarios and testing different things and we are seeing incredible results in questions of speed and in questions of like giving the right results so not having any fake and like errors yeah sure so i've gonna ask you to put your sales hat not on now christina to give you that dopamine hit okay but i wanted to ask you about we've already established gcp are sort of the challenger cloud provider and you've already mentioned that you feel the security is stronger within google cloud than potentially other cloud providers but could you just like sort of tell us why you think gcp is a compelling option for a cto in comparison to the other cloud vendors.