SailPoint CISO Rex Booth has gone through a lot of changes in his career, from the public to private sector.
“I’m deeply appreciative of the opportunity to serve the citizens of the country through service in the federal sector,” Booth told IT Brew. “I’m better oriented towards the flexibility and speed of the private sector than I am the government.”
Federal business. One of the people behind the creation of the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), Booth came to the White House from DHS, working under then-Deputy Associate Director of Threat Hunting Alexis Wales. Wales, now the VP of security operations at GitHub, told IT Brew that Booth’s strategic thinking was key to her tapping him to join her team from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), where he was deputy CISO.
“He’s really very passionate about service and offering something that has high utility to customer sets or to partners,” Wales said. “So, when I had the opportunity to move into threat-hunting, which was coming into its own out of the US CERT model, back in the 2018 to 2019 timeframe, I knew he would be awesome as our leader for the threat intelligence branch.”
Booth was raised in the DC area, where he grew up expecting to become an intelligence analyst. “I always thought it would be really cool to be some sort of, like, Jack Ryan character,” he told IT Brew. But his grades in college weren’t good enough for that, he said, and so he moved to his secondary area of focus, computer science. Doing consulting and computer work got him into the government at PBGC, then to DHS, and then to the White House.
White House calling. Going to the White House to develop the ONCD came as Booth was about to leave the public sector, he said, but“that was something that you just don’t say no to, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing.” The office was established in January 2021, but wasn’t funded until that August—until that point, Booth said, “It was Director [Chris] Inglis and his chief of staff, basically the two of them sitting in a room staring at each other for a few months while they waited for appropriations to come through.”
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“While they waited for that, they sent out a call to a handful of agencies and said, ‘Hey, listen, if you have somebody that you can spare, people that can come in and really kind of do good things, high energy, dependable blah, blah, blah, we would love to borrow them for a little while.’ And so a handful of us joined up,” Booth said.
Private practice. Setting up the ONCD kept Booth from the private sector, but not for long. In September 2022, he joined SailPoint as senior director of cybersecurity operations; he was promoted to CISO in March 2023.
Grady Summers, SailPoint EVP of production, told us that he recruited Booth based in part on their work together a decade earlier at Mandiant. Though they weren’t in the same department, there was some overlap, and once Booth showed interest in coming to SailPoint, Summers made it a priority to get him on board.
“I was thrilled to hear from him; at the time we actually recruited him for a role as essentially a deputy CISO and promoted him up into that shortly thereafter,” Summers told us. “His combination of government background with the private sector [and] having worked in managed detection and response was a real sweet spot of experiences.”