Cody Cornell, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founding father of Swimlane – Interview Series

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Cody Cornell, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Swimlane, leads the corporate’s strategic direction and oversees the event of its security automation and orchestration solutions. He is devoted to fostering an open exchange of experience and best practices, collaborating closely with industry-leading technology vendors and partners. Through these partnerships, Cody identifies opportunities to streamline and automate security operations, accelerating cyber response and advancing security automation initiatives.

Swimlane, founded by a security practitioner aware of the challenges faced by Security Operations (SecOps) teams, provides a comprehensive security automation platform designed to integrate and enhance SecOps workflows. The corporate has grown to turn out to be one in every of the biggest and fastest-growing providers of security automation solutions globally.

As a co-founder of Swimlane, what was the initial vision that led you to create the corporate, and the way has that vision evolved with the rise of AI and automation in cybersecurity?

After we got down to construct Swimlane, our focus wasn’t on market size or sales. As an alternative, we zeroed in on solving the true challenges security teams were facing and helping the organizations we worked with. Our goal was to create a platform built by practitioners, for practitioners—something that security teams would actually value and revel in using.

We’ve succeeded by offering flexibility fairly than prescribing rigid automation frameworks. This approach enables our customers to tackle their unique challenges with creativity, they usually continually surprise us with the revolutionary ways they use the platform. Because the demand for automation—and now AI—soars, Swimlane stands apart with an answer that goes beyond anything out there, enabling organizations to automate every aspect of their security operations. Today, we’re proud to be the biggest and fastest-growing security automation company on this planet.

Swimlane Turbine is understood for combining automation, generative AI, and low-code capabilities. For those unfamiliar, are you able to explain how these three components work together to boost security operations?

Automation, generative AI, and low-code truly are the triple threat that organizations need to resolve essentially the most difficult problems across their entire security organization. This transformative combination allows security teams to quickly construct automation with limitless integration possibilities, driving significant time and resource savings. By combining these capabilities, Swimlane establishes itself at the center of security operations (SecOps), offering the industry’s most comprehensive set of tools to investigate and act on telemetry across the whole security ecosystem.

Low-code automation is a key feature of Swimlane Turbine. How does Turbine Canvas enable organizations to quickly construct and deploy security automation workflows, even for teams that won’t have extensive coding experience?

Turbine Canvas is a low-code playbook-building studio that unleashes the true potential of low code, transforming it from a buzzword into a strong tool that democratizes automation for all users. Through the use of modular, reusable programming components, Turbine Canvas empowers users to create playbooks through an intuitive, user-friendly visual interface.

Turbine Canvas features no-code native actions and AI-playbook constructing tools that enable SecOps teams to design automation workflows as easily as drawing a flowchart. It allows security teams to achieve fast, comprehensive visibility into playbook connections, make centralized edits, and use multiple triggers per playbook for unmatched control and adaptability. This approach redefines automation, prioritizing clarity and collaboration over cryptic, machine-driven logic.

One among Swimlane Turbine’s biggest innovations is Hero AI, which incorporates case summarization and really useful actions. How do these AI-driven tools assist security teams in making faster and more informed decisions?

Hero AI, Swimlane’s suite of AI-powered innovations, amplifies the capabilities of the Swimlane Turbine platform, combining human and machine intelligence to streamline SecOps workflows and maximize ROI. With a non-public large language model (LLM), Hero AI protects customer data while delivering AI-augmented automation. The Crafted Prompts feature gives users the power to leverage their alert, case, intelligence or automation pipelines of their prompts to the Swimlane LLM. This ensures that they’re using all context at their disposal to get the most effective AI responses, but doing so in a secure and personal way.

Key tools inside Hero AI further elevate security operations. Context-Aware Really useful Actions draw on industry frameworks reminiscent of NIST and MITRE, in addition to the organization’s own Knowledge Center documentation, to deliver tailored recommendations that enhance decision-making. AI Case Summarization simplifies the complexity of incidents, helping analysts prioritize and address critical issues faster. Moreover, AI Reporting enables users to generate stakeholder-ready after-action reports with a single click, in any language, and robotically share them. This functionality ensures seamless communication with stakeholders, fostering collaboration and improving decision-making processes across diverse teams.

The platform also features the Energetic Sensing Fabric for processing vast amounts of security data. Are you able to discuss how this capability enhances traditional SOC functions and improves the general efficiency of security operations?

The Energetic Sensing Fabric enables security automation solutions to transcend legacy SOAR platform telemetry sources, ingesting larger and more diverse and hard-to-reach data sets while taking immediate motion on the source—eliminating the necessity for extensive coding to attach technology silos. This capability allows for faster identification, tracking, and response to threats.

Swimlane Turbine’s Energetic Sensing Fabric is designed to drive the evolution of security operations. It ingests data at cloud scale from a variety of distributed big data sources, essential for today’s complex infrastructure that features webhooks, poll requests, pub/sub, file creation, SMS, email, and IoT data streams.

By enabling automation platforms to attract data directly from these sources, the Energetic Sensing Fabric moves motion closer to the source to attenuate dwell time. It repeatedly listens across the safety ecosystem, taking immediate motion directly on the source.

With Swimlane being trusted by 40 Fortune 500 firms and a number of other U.S. federal agencies, what strategies have been only in constructing and maintaining such high levels of trust together with your clients?

AI automation is emerging because the cornerstone of contemporary security operations, and Swimlane stands on the forefront of this transformation. By tackling each the immediate demands of real-time threat response and the strategic imperative for measurable business outcomes, Swimlane is leading SecOps innovation. Leveraging AI automation, advanced analytics, best-in-class case management and a dynamic marketplace, Swimlane sets recent benchmarks for efficiency and scalability in security operations. These advancements empower organizations to fortify their defenses, reduce operational strain, and construct a resilient security posture in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Swimlane Turbine delivers a reported 240% return on investment for enterprises. Could you share specific features or case studies that illustrate how this ROI is achieved in practice?

Swimlane Turbine’s ability to deliver a 240% return on investment (ROI) in the primary 12 months is grounded in its transformative impact on enterprise operations. In accordance with a TAG Cyber report, this ROI is achieved through several key advantages:

  • Personnel Time Savings: By streamlining workflows and automating repetitive tasks, Turbine significantly reduces the manual effort required from security teams, allowing analysts to deal with strategic and high-value activities.
  • Faster Incident Response: Turbine accelerates response times, helping prevent potential breaches and minimizing the operational costs related to incident recovery.
  • Lower ITSM Costs: Swimlane’s integrations reduce the reliance on disjointed and overlapping tools, leading to cost savings for IT service management systems.
  • Cloud-Native Efficiency: Turbine’s cloud-native architecture reduces infrastructure costs, providing scalability without the necessity for extensive on-premises resources.

The ROI is further amplified by our AI capabilities. A follow-up study from TAG Cyber estimated that AI enhancements could increase ROI by an extra 20%. For instance, AI-powered automation in a typical 20-person SOC, where the typical worker salary is $250,000, can boost productivity by 20%, potentially saving $1 million annually in personnel costs alone.

As automation becomes more prevalent, there are concerns in regards to the potential displacement of security professionals. How does Swimlane address these concerns, and in what ways does your platform empower security teams fairly than replace them?

Despite rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and automation inside cybersecurity, preserving a human element in operations stays essential. Human intuition and expertise are invaluable in interpreting and addressing the subtleties of cyber threats that AI might miss. SOC analysts bring contextual understanding, ethical judgment, and artistic problem-solving—capabilities that AI has yet to totally replicate.

At the identical time, AI and automation won’t displace security professionals but will as an alternative displace low-level tasks. By automating routine processes and using AI for grunt work, humans can deal with strategic decision-making, which ultimately empowers SOC teams and improves the day-to-day life for all roles inside the SOC.

Swimlane seamlessly integrates AI together with your team of human analysts. Hero AI is a revolutionary suite of AI-powered innovations that mixes human expertise with machine intelligence, streamlining SecOps workflows and maximizing return on investment.

In your view, how will AI proceed to shape the longer term of security operations, and what role do you see Swimlane playing in that future?

AI’s impact on cybersecurity and beyond is undeniably transformative. In a digital era marked by the increasing volume, velocity, and class of cyber threats, AI will not be only a luxury but a necessity. By automating routine tasks and enhancing threat detection, AI empowers human experts to deal with more complex, strategic challenges, ultimately strengthening our defenses. The majority of organizations (89%) report that using generative AI (GenAI) and enormous language models (LLMs) has already improved productivity and efficiency for his or her cybersecurity teams. In consequence, a 3rd (33%) of organizations plan to allocate greater than 30% of their 2025 cybersecurity budgets to AI-powered or AI-enhanced solutions. Organizations that embrace AI are positioning themselves as leaders in innovation, turning vulnerabilities into opportunities to construct more resilient security postures. As each organizations and societies face these evolving threats, responsible and strategic AI adoption can be crucial—not just for enhancing cybersecurity but additionally for safeguarding democratic processes and public trust.

At Swimlane, we’re committed to seamlessly integrating AI across our platform to make it more accessible and effective. With the pressures of breaches, regulatory fines, understaffed teams, and mounting board expectations, security operations centers (SOCs) need a force multiplier—security automation and AI—now greater than ever. Swimlane is here to supply that solution, empowering teams to reply faster and more effectively to the evolving threat landscape.

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