Johnson will oversee the company’s entire product portfolio, including leadership and management of all product development, innovation and strategic integration efforts. He will focus on continuous customer value-creation through the company’s data-first SASE offering, delivering unified secure access and data protection that spans on-premises, hybrid and cloud.
Johnson explained, “Forcepoint has done a phenomenal job through its customer-first focus, which is critical to exceed customer expectations in embracing the move to cloud. There is a tremendous opportunity in front of us and I look forward to continuing to develop and innovate new pathways for customers as they realize the true business enabling power security can deliver.”
Manny Rivelo, CEO of Forcepoint, added, “The timing is perfect to welcome Rees Johnson as our chief product officer. Forcepoint’s data security heritage has proven to be a game-changer for SASE, and Rees’ background made him the perfect executive to assume the helm of leading our SASE product development teams. Rees has been a cybersecurity innovator and disruptor for more than two decades and I look forward to partnering with him as we accelerate investment and development in [our] data-first SASE offering.”
Johnson brings more than 20 years of product management experience in network security, cloud security and SaaS migration strategy to Forcepoint. He joins Forcepoint from Symantec, where he was senior vice president of product management for the company’s enterprise division. In this role, he moved the company’s products to support a full SaaS business model while helping support customer migration to SaaS from traditional on-premises products.
Prior to Symantec, Johnson held senior leadership roles at Intel (formerly McAfee) including senior vice president and general manager of the content and SaaS security business as well as senior vice president of McAfee Labs.