Ostrich Cyber-Risk Appoints Yiannis Vassiliades as Chief Product Officer

Former Senior Director Products, MDR, at Sophos, and Cybersecurity Industry Veteran Brings Extensive Product Strategy and Management Experience to Ostrich Cyber-Risk.

Ostrich Cyber-Risk™, the unified cyber risk management company, today announced that Yiannis Vassiliades has joined the Executive Leadership Team as Chief Product Officer. Vassiliades joins Ostrich Cyber-Risk most recently from Sophos, a worldwide leader and innovator of advanced cybersecurity solutions. 

Throughout his career, Vassiliades has driven innovative product strategy and management to compete and win in the rapidly evolving and competitive cybersecurity market. In his most recent position as Senior Director Products, MDR at Sophos, he was on the core team to build a new division for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and brought Sophos into the MDR market with a global launch of its Managed Threat Detection service—positioning Sophos as one of the largest MDR providers.  

Vassiliades’ Sophos portfolio also includes two additional global launches and three acquisitions. He launched the Sophos Rapid Response that expanded the company’s managed services into the remote Incident Response (IR) market; and SophosLabs Intelix, its threat intelligence platform, for use outside of the Sophos product portfolio. Vassiliades’ three successful acquisitions included Darkbytes, a cloud platform high tech startup; Rook Security, an MSSP and Braintrace, an NDR/MDR vendor, to accelerate the growth of, and broaden the Sophos MDR service scope. 

In addition to Sophos, Vassiliades brings more than two decades of Product, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), and CEO experience to Ostrich Cyber-Risk, leading product divisions at several venture-backed startups that were acquired by globally known companies including Verizon and BlueCoat/Symantec (now Broadcom). Prior to Sophos, Vassiliades served as Vice President of Products for Cyber Reliant and Protectwise, Inc., respectively. In 2006, he cofounded a startup, Fortisphere, that was later acquired by RedHat. He spent the first 10 years of his career working for large technology enterprises including IBM, Raytheon and Computer Associates (now Broadcom) gaining expertise in security analytics, data security, enterprise SaaS applications, appliance-based products and Detection and Response. 

“I’m thrilled to welcome Yiannis Vassiliades to the Ostrich Cyber-Risk team,” said Bret Laughlin, Co-Founder and CEO. “Yiannis is an outstanding leader with a proven ability to build and lead high performing teams that drive new and innovative product development solutions to competitively position even early-stage startups in the market, in a short amount of time. Yiannis has what it takes to lead the company’s Go-To-Market strategy, and ultimately position Ostrich Cyber-Risk as a leader in enterprise cyber risk management.”

— Bret Laughlin, CEO and Co-Founder

In his role as Chief Product Officer at Ostrich Cyber-Risk, Vassiliades brings his product and company expansion expertise to lead the Product and Go-To-Market strategies, manage analyst relations and direct engineering and product marketing. Together with his executive and engineering leadership team, he will work to advance Ostrich Cyber-Risk's position as a leader in the cyber risk management and Cyber-risk Quantification (CRQ) spaces. 

Yiannis Vassiliades, Chief Product Officer

“I am thrilled to join the passionate and dynamic team at Ostrich Cyber-Risk,” said Vassiliades. “There is an underserved need to help security and risk leaders understand and measure their risk exposure and use this knowledge to effectively prioritize, communicate and decide how to best reduce their attack surface. Ostrich Cyber-Risk has the foundational technology that will directly enable companies address this problem with its Birdseye™ SaaS solution. I am excited to lead this evolving product to the mass market. Carpe Diem.” 

To learn more about the Birdseye™ solution, visit our product section.