New CEO Amit Yoran will helm Tenable Network Security’s ‘next phase’ of growth

Tenable Network Security is heading into 2017 with a new CEO.
The Columbia-based cybersecurity company announced that it be will be led by Amit Yoran, who will leave his role as president of RSA Security, the cybersecurity unit of Dell Technologies.
Yoran will step in on Jan. 3, about six months after founding CEO Ron Gula stepped down. He said Tenable was “an incredible company with a fantastic future still ahead of it.”
In Yoran, the company tapped a CEO with experience running a billion-dollar company. Though it is scaling in its own right with more than 700 employees, Tenable is comparatively smaller than RSA. But the decision to take the role wasn’t based on size, Yoran said.
“It was less a matter of running something smaller or larger, and much more a question of finding the right platform with the right capability for where the market is evolving to,” Yoran said. The main draw is the fact that Tenable is helping companies and government customers understand their level of vulnerability to cyber threats, Yoran said.
He joined RSA after the acquisition of his Reston-based network forensics startup, NetWitness. Another previous startup, Riptech, was acquired by Symantec in 2002. Yoran also has government experience in leading the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) program in the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Following a $250 million Series B round in 2015, Tenable cofounder Jack Huffard said the company’s leadership thought about the “next phase” for the company, which grew from being bootstrapped for 10 years to where it is today with hundreds of employees, doing business in 20 countries.
“I think that’s a lot different than three guys in a garage. It just takes a different skill set,” Huffard, who is the company’s COO, said of running a company that size. Both Yoran and Huffard also hinted in interviews Thursday that there is potential for an IPO.
Gula, Huffard and cofounder and CTO Renaud Deraison already had a professional relationship with Yoran.
“The fact that we ended up where we did with [Yoran], a very well-known person in our world, who is respected in our industry, and was in the region — it all meshed together,” Huffard said.
Yoran will also become the company’s chairman. Huffard and Deraison, who led the company during the search for a new CEO, will continue in their top roles.