Skyhigh Security Hires Former Snow Software Leader As CEO

The security service edge vendor says Vishal Rao will become CEO following the departure of Gee Rittenhouse to AWS.

Skyhigh Security announced Thursday that it has hired the former CEO of Snow Software, Vishal Rao, as its new chief executive.

Rao will take on the role following the departure of former Skyhigh CEO Gee Rittenhouse, who recently left the company to head the enterprise security business at AWS.

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In a news release, security service edge vendor Skyhigh said that Rao will take on the CEO role at the company “effective immediately.”

Security service edge (SSE) is an integrated set of technologies focused on enabling secure remote access to an organization’s applications and other resources. Core capabilities include zero trust network access (ZTNA) as a more-secure alternative to VPNs, cloud access security broker (CASB) for protecting SaaS usage and secure web gateway (SWG) for protecting internet usage.

Skyhigh Security’s SSE platform has aimed to stand out from competitors by bringing a major focus on data protection, including through its data loss prevention (DLP) technology.

Following the merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye in 2021, the combined company was then split into two parts in 2022—with the SSE division becoming Skyhigh Security, led previously by Rittenhouse, a former Cisco security executive, as CEO. The remainder of the company was renamed Trellix.

Rao brings experience from more than two decades in cloud and SaaS companies, Skyhigh said in its release Thursday.

He most recently served as president and CEO at Snow Software, a role he had held since early 2019. Earlier, Rao held executive roles at companies including Cloudera and Splunk.

Rao has an “outstanding track record” that will drive Skyhigh’s next phase of growth, said Marc Bala, managing director at investment firm Symphony Technology Group, which owns Skyhigh.

In February, Skyhigh rolled out a major expansion to its channel program with the aim of enabling more partners to deliver professional and managed services around its SSE platform. The expansion added training and certification for professional services partners as well as MSPs.

The move has included a commitment that Skyhigh’s internal team will only deliver professional services for the largest enterprises, which often require direct involvement from vendors, Channel Chief Scott Goree told CRN.