Last month, we hosted our inaugural Security Automation Roadshow in San Francisco, bringing our brilliant community of builders together for knowledge sharing, interactive learning, and, of course, workflow building.
Speaking at the event, our co-founder and CEO Eoin Hinchy shared the inspiration for the series. Earlier in his career, he saw how important community and peer-to-peer networking can be for both organizations and individual professional development.
"The motivation for this is to get our builders talking to each other directly rather than just learning from us," Eoin said. "With Tines, you can build anything you want - any workflow connecting any technology stack."
We find that the best inspiration for what to build next really comes from other builders, rather than us. Nothing can replace the insights of a trusted peer, especially one who works in a similar industry or profession.
Eoin Hinchy, CEO, Tines
The Security Automation Roadshow by Tines comes to Dallas on April 9, London on May 22, and New York on October 23, with more cities soon to be announced. In the meantime, let's take a closer look at how the San Francisco roadshow went.
Tines talks
Eoin kicked off the Security Automation Roadshow: San Francisco with a keynote, sharing the enormous impact of workflow automation and detailing how Tines became a platform purpose-built to empower technical teams.
Attendees on the day also heard from:
John Tuckner, manager of Tines Labs
Jiong Liu, senior director of product marketing, Wiz
Janel Schalk, advisory chief information security officer (CISO), Trace3
James Spiteri, director of product management, Elastic
Dan Hubbard, founder of Disrupt Security
Each speaker provided an expert perspective on how organizations can use workflow automation to operate more effectively, mitigate risk, reduce tech debt, and do the work that matters most.
The stars of the show were undoubtedly Tines customers, with the highlight being a customer panel discussion including Jared Gaut, principal security engineer, Sprinklr; Josh Liburdi, staff security engineer, Brex; Pablo Vega, head of information security, PathAI; and security operations leader Erik Bloch.
Tines users Jared Gaut, principal security engineer, Sprinklr; Josh Liburdi, staff security engineer, Brex; and security operations leader Erik Bloch.
The group talked through the most interesting and important workflows they've created with Tines. Some were simple, some were complex, and some were hilarious, like a Tines workflow that features a Walker Texas Ranger Slack bot.
"Some days you just need a fix of dumb humor," Liburdi explained.
Elsewhere, workflows for phishing response management were popular with several customers. Onboarding and offboarding of employees was another common use case that relied on tedious, manual tasks before automation.
Both new and experienced users said they were attracted to Tines’ intuitive and flexible design, and effectiveness in facilitating workflows that don't require specialized knowledge or ongoing management.
"When I build a Tines story, I'm like, 'Good. Done. Shipped.' Then I can move on to the next thing," Liburdi said. "We have a small team and always have more to do. We just wanted something that would let us avoid writing code so we could create something fast that is stable, and move on to the next thing. And Tines gives us that."
Bloch added that Tines is helping to "democratize" process automation.
With Tines, we are able to avoid using expert systems that require esoteric knowledge and skills. When we moved to Tines, I was able to give it to everyone on our team and know they would be able to successfully use it to address their own workflows to be more efficient and move faster.
Erik Bloch, security operations leader
Building together
In the afternoon, beginner builders teamed up with Tines engineers for guidance and hands-on practice in creating some of their first workflows.
Ariel Valencia, an information security analyst at Samsara, who recently started using Tines, said the in-person learning was a great supplement to all the information available through Tines University.
"I've only really just started trying to figure out how it all works," she said. "It makes a big difference to have someone walk you through it and be able to ask questions, such as learning how to debug my workflows so I can fix them myself. Once you get those basics down, you can run with whatever processes you'd like to automate."
Attendees participate in hands-on building sessions with automation experts.
Users agreed that the best place to start with Tines is usually manual processes that are highly repetitive and create major time drains.
Sprinklr’s Jared Gaut cautioned against starting on a complex project when first using Tines. A simple project, he noted, makes it easy to get to grips with the platform and quickly show results to stakeholders.
He also noted that you can create a simple, initial Tines story that you can grow over time by connecting to additional stories and incrementally building a more extensive workflow.
Emre Saglam, head of security and compliance at Dremio, said the Roadshow offered a valuable opportunity to hear from other customers about how they are using Tines.
These types of events are mainly about the ‘What’. When you learn how others are using Tines, it opens up your thinking about what kind of processes you might automate. It inspires you to find even more ways to put Tines to use to eliminate manual processes throughout your organization.
Emre Saglam, Head of Security and Compliance, Dremio
Find out about our next Security Automation Roadshow.