At Axonius, human connection is ingrained in everything we do. We live and breathe it internally, in our culture. But we make sure it extends into our marketing and the experiences we create for our audience, too.
Human connection — emotional connection — is the underlying motivation for everything we’re doing to build our brand. Why? Because, when it comes down to it, people don’t buy based on logic. They buy based on emotion — and an effective brand knows how to tap into just that.
Too often, though, we see the exact opposite of emotion in cybersecurity. Mechanical robots. Matrix-style numbers falling from the sky. Military-grade encryption and endpoint protection designed for protecting against the bad guys and battling hackers in hoodies.
You get the point.
It’s like cybersecurity vendors have ignored who actually buys what we’re selling. (Spoiler alert: It’s people. People buy what we’re selling.) Nothing feels human — and in that dilemma, we saw incredible opportunity.
Take the Axonius Controlling Complexity campaign, for example.
Our campaign with Simone Biles isn’t about working with the most decorated Olympic gymnast of all-time (OK, that part’s pretty cool, I won’t lie). No. It’s about humanizing our message of Controlling Complexity by telling the stories of real-life people overcoming real-life complexity and adversity.
One of the keys to controlling complexity? The ability to adapt. When life hands us enormous challenges, we inevitably have to adjust our approach. We have to adapt to what’s in front of us — and it’s adaptation that enables us to control what’s going on in our environment.
While it may not seem so on the surface, there are actually major parallels between Axonius partners Simone Biles and Amy Bream and IT and cybersecurity. In athletics, any number of challenges can pop up during a competition that Simone and Amy have to adapt to. They have to take those challenges as they come, and harness the complexities they pose. Maintaining control over their performance and routine requires them to adapt to their environment.
The same is true for IT and cybersecurity practitioners.
On any given day, you’ve got devices, users, software, SaaS apps — you name it — coming in and out of your environment. Your attack surface is constantly evolving, with only more complexities coming into play as time goes on and technology shifts. The same approach you took last year or even last week may not work for what you’re up against today. And so you continuously adapt to the changes. You harness that complexity in order to control your environment.
The very nature of IT and cybersecurity requires you to stay sharp, on your toes, and responsive to the challenges and complexities around you — just like Simone and Amy.
We launched the initial iteration of our campaign about six months ago (more about that here), and today I’m beyond proud to share with you the next chapter of this story: Controlling Complexity: Adaptation.
So often, we only see one side of Simone and Amy’s stories. We see who the media portrays them to be: incredible athletes on a national and international stage. And while they are incredible athletes, they’re both so much more.
In partnering with Simone and Amy, we’ve heard the inspiring stories of how they’re adapting. Not just within their respective sports (and for Amy, throughout day-to-day life with a prosthetic leg) — but how they’re adapting beyond the awards and accolades to make major impacts in the communities around them.
For Simone, her community impact comes into play in a major way with Friends of the Children. Friends of the Children is a national nonprofit that aims to end the cycle of generational poverty by providing professional, paid mentors to children in foster care, from as early as age four all the way through high school graduation.
As a former foster child herself, Simone is deeply ingrained in the mission of Friends of the Children. She understands the power it plays in helping kids in the system adapt to the complexities of their life.
Amy’s impact is demonstrated deeply through her close relationship with both 8-year-old Alex Morgan and Alex’s family. At age four, Alex was diagnosed with Gorham Stout Disease and had her leg amputated. Searching for others in their community who had overcome the same obstacles led Anna, Alex’s mom, to Amy.
Today, Alex views Amy as a mentor-turned-friend. Amy has shown Alex that, while the complexities that come with having only one leg do require her to adapt how she lives her life, they don’t limit what she’s capable of accomplishing.
Directed by Simone Biles and Amy Bream, Controlling Complexity: Adaptation tells two separate stories bound by the same belief: When faced with enormous complexity, the best not only find a way to adapt to the challenge. They also find a way to give back.
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