QTS Appoints Its First Cybersecurity Chief update from September 2016

QTS Realty Trust has become one of the first data center service providers to appoint a Chief Information Security Officer.

The company has hired Andrew Wild to fill the newly created position. Wild formerly served as chief security officer at Lancope, an Alpharetta, Georgia-based information security company acquired by Cisco last September to advance its enterprise security strategy.

Equinix is the only one of the other five publicly traded US data center REITs that has a CISO. Jon Greaves, QTS CTO, explained in a statement that the company decided to invest in the new position because security threats are “evolving day by day.”

QTS differs from the other REITs in that it also provides a variety of managed and cloud services in addition to raw data center capacity. Customers can access other services in the other REITs’ facilities, but those are provided by their partners rather than by the REITs themselves.

See also: QTS Launches Public OpenStack Cloud

As a managed service and cloud provider, QTS is likely to have a bigger need for in-house cybersecurity know-how than the other data center providers do.

Prior to joining Lancope in 2014, Wild served as CSO at Qualys, a cybersecurity firm that went public in 2012. Before Qualys, he was manager of information security engineering at EMC.

For the last two years he has been a startup mentor and advisor at Mach37, a Washington, DC-area accelerator focused on cybersecurity.

Correction: Contrary to what the previous version of this article said, Equinix has a CISO. The article has been corrected accordingly.