Toast’s Rebecca Blair: Lessons From Building a Security Operations Team From Scratch

Today on the Future of Security Operations Podcast, Thomas speaks with Rebecca Blair, Manager of the Security Operations Center at Toast, an all-in-one point-of-sale and restaurant management platform for businesses in the food service and hospitality space. After working in a variety of different cybersecurity roles over the past decade, Rebecca joined Toast in 2021 as the first employee of their security operations center. On this episode, she shares lessons learned as she scaled the team along with her insights on what’s in store for the future of security operations. 

Topics discussed in this episode:

- The state of security operations today.

- How to prioritize what needs to be done first when you are building a security operations team from scratch. 

- How to measure the efficacy of your alerts to determine what’s worth keeping and what you should get rid of.

- How Toast reduces the amount of manual time spent on tasks and how they keep their team happy and excited about the work they do.

- How to develop and source cybersecurity talent.

- How working towards an MBA has changed how she approaches security. 

- Why Rebecca loves dashboards and why they are critical to her work. 

- How Toast prioritizes mental health for their entire team. 

- Tips for how to run a good purple team. 

- What security operations teams will look like in the future.