Meet an ISC Staff Member – Vicky Risk!

All of our staff profiles so far have been of our engineers, who are of course very important and make up the majority of ISC. But this time, we thought we’d focus on someone who regularly interacts with many of our customers and users: Vicky Risk, ISC’s Product Manager and Director of Marketing.

Vicky began her college years studying architecture, then geology, and then philosophy. But she ended up in the network computing world after getting a job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where, she says, “my first assignment involved sorting about 9,000 index cards three different ways, and typing them up into three lists. That was when I decided that was a job for a computer, and I set about computerizing that whole process.”

She adds, “I ended up with a motley assortment of early PCs with different operating systems and no pre-installed software. I got my boss to send me to database programming summer camp, and that was the end of typing lists. And while I was at MIT, I got an MBA from Simmons College.”

What followed has been a satisfying product management career at a series of networking companies, including Cayman Systems (anyone remember the GatorBox?), Banyan Networks, Ascend Communications, Combinet Systems, and 15 years at Cisco Systems. After a layoff at Cisco and hanging out at home for a bit, doing some traveling and volunteer work, ISC president Jeff Osborn (whom she met while working at Cayman) asked Vicky if she was interested in a new job. She needed the health insurance, so naturally she said yes.

When asked what her favorite thing is about working for ISC, Vicky responds “Health insurance? No, don’t say that. Maybe the general air of moral superiority? No, don’t say that either. It’s really that my colleagues are so smart and interesting and committed to their work. I also kind of like going to conferences and hearing about operator issues in an environment where nobody expects me to solve the problem!”

In her roles as both the Product Manager and Director of Marketing, Vicky says, “My job is to make our users aware of the contributions we are making at ISC, so that hopefully they will appreciate our work. I also want our staff to be aware of, and appreciate, the concerns of our users. One of my top priorities is to ensure that ISC remains trustable, which means striving for transparency and honesty as much as possible, particularly when we make a mistake. While we have applied for the occasional grant, I am very proud of the fact that ISC is funded almost entirely by our users, which means we are sincerely focused on their success.”

Vicky highlights another important aspect of her work: “Over the past year or two I have become more involved with external teams working to understand and influence the emerging wave of government regulations aimed at improving software security. It is hard to keep up with these efforts, but I have been able to make some contributions. I have enjoyed working with people from other open source organizations, but I am not convinced that more regulation will actually improve our collective cybersecurity posture.”

Vicky has an excellent sense of humor and is very self-deprecating. She says " I am known for making a lot of typos, but the good news is that I’m not involved in writing the software!" But she also has many strengths, including “a willingness to try things I don’t know how to do. One of the best things about working in a small company is the variety of things you get to do, which is much more interesting for me than a more specialized job.”

As always, we hope you’ve enjoyed this peek behind the ISC curtain. We hope that sharing a little about us helps strengthen our connection to our customers and users. We welcome your feedback at marketing@isc.org, and thank you for using ISC’s software!