At Sicra, Gaute leads the company’s continued growth across the Nordics with a focus on combining deep technical expertise, holistic security thinking and strong professional environments within IT and OT security. He is particularly focused on how security can act as an enabler for development, innovation and secure digital transformation.

What made you want to become CEO of Sicra?

What attracted me was the combination of extremely high technical expertise and a strong culture of knowledge sharing and professional pride. Sicra has built a unique environment within both IT and OT security, and the opportunity to further develop this at a time when cybersecurity is a top priority was incredibly exciting.

Read the story: Stig Valderhaug steps down – Gaute Lien takes over as new CEO

What is your ambition for Sicra?

We will continue building on the strong foundation that already exists and further develop Sicra as a leading Nordic cybersecurity company. At the same time, it is important to preserve the culture and professional environment that make Sicra special.

What makes Sicra special to you?

What makes Sicra special to me is the people and the professional environment. I experience a very strong culture of knowledge sharing, curiosity and professional pride. Here, you find people with deep expertise across everything from security leadership and SOC to networking, OT, cloud, identity and incident response, while at the same time maintaining a very down to earth and pragmatic approach to cybersecurity.

For me, it is exactly this combination of deep technical expertise and the ability to collaborate across disciplines that makes Sicra unique. It is also why I believe we are well positioned to help organizations navigate increasingly complex security challenges going forward.

Meet the people at Sicra >

What do you believe characterizes a strong security environment?

The best security environments combine technical depth with collaboration and curiosity. Cybersecurity is a field that evolves extremely quickly, so the ability to continuously learn and share knowledge is absolutely essential. This also means that the practical application of security expertise is what creates real value. That is why it is important for many people to be experts in, or continue developing within, something beyond security itself, whether that is critical technical solutions, technological transformation, leadership and governance, or service modeling.

What is the biggest cybersecurity challenge organizations face today?

Many organizations spend a great deal of time on regulatory compliance and reporting, but that does not necessarily mean they are well prepared for real threats. Attackers are not looking for certifications, they are looking for open doors.

At the same time, organizations are becoming increasingly complex, digital and dependent on others, while the distinction between IT and OT is becoming less clear. This makes the need for holistic security even more important.

What should organizations prioritize to strengthen security?

The most important thing is to work holistically. Technology control alone is not enough, even though it is still a central part. Good security is about the combination of leadership, expertise and services. Organizations must understand what is critical, build robust security processes and solutions, and ensure they are able to detect and manage incidents when they occur.

You have experience from PwC, Accenture and FFI. What do you bring with you into Sicra?

I bring experience from working with some of the largest and most complex organizations in the Nordics and Europe. This has given me a deep understanding of both the threat landscape and what it actually takes to build strong security environments over time.

How do you view developments within IT and OT security?

We see technology domains increasingly converging. Critical infrastructure, industrial environments and traditional IT systems are far more tightly integrated than before, and this creates entirely new security requirements. That is why organizations need a more holistic approach where networking, identity, monitoring and security operations are closely connected.

Security is not just about digital systems either. We increasingly see physical and digital security converging as threat actors adopt hybrid attack approaches. When an incident occurs, it may involve both human and machine identities across physical and digital segmentation, access control, monitoring and response. Organizations therefore need to think of security as one unified discipline in order to maintain trust.

Read the story: Sicra’s security triangle: Holistic IT and OT security through leadership, monitoring, and expertise >

We also see the same within AI. Some organizations jump uncritically into new technology without understanding the risks, while others become paralyzed. The ones that succeed best are those that manage to combine curiosity with maturity and control.

What motivates you in your work?

What motivates me most is building strong professional teams and helping organizations manage real security challenges. Cybersecurity is largely about protecting critical societal functions, which makes the work both meaningful and important.

What do you want customers and employees to associate with Sicra?

High professional quality, trust and genuine expertise. We want to be an environment that both customers and employees experience as competent, down to earth and solution oriented.

I also want Sicra to be associated with confidence during change. We will help organizations adopt new technology in a way that creates speed, value and competitiveness, not fear.

What will be most important for Sicra going forward?

Continuing to grow without losing what makes us strong today. We will continue developing as a leading security competence environment in the Nordics, while preserving the culture, quality and closeness to our customers.

The goal is not only to protect organizations better, but to make them more confident in developing faster in the face of new technology and an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Is there anything else fun we should know about you?

I probably have a bit of an outside the box personality and enjoy combining familiar concepts in new ways. For example, I have a higher education degree in mathematics applied to electronic music. I also enjoy playing chess, especially blitz and rapid chess where I can combine strategy with quick decision making. In some ways, it is not entirely unlike cybersecurity: You need to understand the bigger picture, think several moves ahead and at the same time handle high speed and unpredictability, balancing the safe and the creative.