This week on Random Memory Access: we're diving into my recent conversation with former SolarWinds CISO Tim Brown, we chatted stress, recovery, resilience and what the future CISO looks like. A man who would go through a heart attack all over again for his community deserves to be listened to! Let’s get into it →

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Stress isn’t the problem. Recovery is.

Most people tell leaders to reduce stress. Tim disagrees. Stress comes with the job. The real problem is never switching off and never recovering. We talk about burnout, performance and why resilience starts long before the next crisis.

The future isn’t prevention. It’s resilience.

AI is changing cybersecurity faster than most people realise. Tim argues we need to stop obsessing over preventing every breach and start designing organisations that recover quickly. The future belongs to resilience, not perfection.

Don’t worry about the things you can’t change.

Everyone knows the SolarWinds story. Fewer people know what it taught Tim as a leader and as a person. We talk about perspective, surviving a heart attack and why learning to let go of what you can’t control changes everything.

Community saved me.

Leading through crisis can be incredibly lonely. Tim reflects on how the cybersecurity community helped him through the toughest period of his career and why investing in relationships matters just as much as investing in technology.

Every founder starts in the wrong place.

Most founders lead with features and technology. Tim explains why that’s backwards. Customers don’t buy architecture. They buy outcomes. If you’re building or selling security products, this part is worth listening to.

For decades cybersecurity has been built around one objective: stop the attacker. Tim believes AI is forcing us to rethink that assumption. As attackers become faster and more capable, organisations need to spend less time chasing perfect prevention and more time building systems that can withstand failure and recover quickly.

We explore why resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity are becoming strategic capabilities rather than operational afterthoughts. Tim also shares a fascinating perspective on how AI could fundamentally change security architecture itself. We’ve spent years simplifying environments because humans struggle to manage complexity. AI may allow us to build systems that are more distributed, more resilient and ultimately harder to compromise.

It’s a discussion about where cybersecurity is heading over the next decade, and why the best security programmes won’t be measured by whether they get breached, but by how quickly and effectively they bounce back.

Read more about Jake’s thoughts in a recent article.

This week my son lost his school cup final. He put hours in to this match in terms of planning, strategy and training in the garden every day. He was the best player on the pitch. He gave everything. He still lost that day and it took him a while to wipe away the tears and move on but it taught three key lessons.

Some Things You Cant Change:
You can be the best player on the pitch but your keeper can have a nightmare and you can hit the post 5 times and you still don’t win. Accepting failure and rebuilding for next time is fundamental to individual and team success.

Stress is ok:
Worry. Fear. Anxiety. Heartbreak. These emotions are all ok. It’s ok, even healthy, to feel them from time to time like working out your muscles in the gym you need to work out your emotional muscles too.

Resilience Matters Most:
No one remembers who won. They all remember the way you reacted. Was proud to see my son go congratulate the opposition and, after a lot of tears, move on and think about the next challenge in his life. We need to learn to be resilient as people and as companies which means understanding our weaknesses and testing them more.