Virsec, which provides application-aware workload cyber protection, has announced a substantial investment in senior executive hires to drive new expansion across Australia and New Zealand. As part of the expansion, Virsec has appointed cybersecurity veterans Rob Nobilo and Ben Burt to leadership roles, both former employees of Palo Alto Networks. Nobilo will serve as regional sales director for ANZ, while Burt will act as regional technical services director for ANZ.
Bobby Gupta, senior vice president and managing director for Virsec’s international business, said the focus in ANZ will be on protecting vulnerable critical infrastructure across the defence, energy, and water sectors, along with large enterprises including banks, financial services, telcos, and retailers. “Virsec has a very ambitious plan for Australia and New Zealand. We already have a presence in Brisbane and Melbourne and plan to hire more staff in Sydney and Canberra,” said Gupta. “In a very short time since launching our product in Australia, we have signed some key strategic partners and we recently went live with a new major customer.”
Nobilo brings years of in-depth experience as a former Sales Director at Palo Alto Networks, looking after enterprise accounts in BFSI, retail, healthcare, utilities and mining. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, Nobilo spent five years at Dimension Data (now NTT) in various roles including Security Practice Manager and National Business Manager of Managed Security Services. “Virsec is gearing up for rapid growth in the ANZ region and I am keen to continue building the team over the coming year. The cybersecurity market in ANZ is worth around A$5 billion and we will keep expanding at an annual rate of 18 percent till 2026,” said Nobilo.
Burt, also a former systems engineer at Palo Alto Networks, has extensive experience in delivering tailored cybersecurity solutions for SME customers all the way to telcos, government entities and service providers.
According to Gupta, Virsec has leveraged its expertise in microprocessor architecture, software design and cybersecurity to develop a highly sophisticated, novel approach to protecting software applications and workloads. “Virsec provides the first and only application-aware workload protection platform that incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution. We deliver in-depth visibility across the entire workload and detect, and block known and unknown threats that remain undetected by heuristic and endpoint security solutions,” added Gupta.