Regulatory & Compliance
Ayana Ward, Director of Customer Success for the US and EMEA, on bringing a cyber practitioner's eye to resilience, earning trust through honesty, and why chasing perfection can stall a program.
Ayana Ward is Director of Customer Success for the US and EMEA at iluminr. In this interview she explains what connects cyber and resilience, what separates the customers who get real value from microsimulations, what HackerOne taught her about earning trust, and why she now believes chasing perfection can slow a program down.
In December 2025 she joined iluminr as Director of Customer Success for the US and EMEA, bringing a cyber practitioner's instinct to operational resilience.
Seven months in, she has a clear read on what connects the two worlds and what separates the customers who get real value from those who stall. The word she keeps returning to is honesty. We spoke with her about earning trust, why chasing perfection can quietly stall a program, and the crawl, walk, run approach she uses to bring an overwhelmed customer back from the ledge.
The road in
Q: What made iluminr the right next move for you?
Ayana: I've always been drawn to roles where I'm customer facing with a platform that delivers real, measurable value. My goal was never just to manage accounts. It was to understand what a customer is trying to accomplish and help them move faster and with more confidence. What pulled me to iluminr was that the work and the product felt so meaningful. We're not selling something abstract or a nice-to-have. We're helping organizations test how they respond when things get dangerous or high-pressure, with real things at stake, especially given everything going on in the world right now.
That's where I love working, helping teams turn their resilience goals into something practical, repeatable, and measurable, so everyone knows what to do when things get messy.
Q: You've worked across security testing, cyber upskilling, and now operational resilience. What's the connection?
Ayana: To me they're all links in the same chain. They're just different segments of making sure an organization's posture is as strong as possible. My background is really in cybersecurity, but cybersecurity can't be as strong as it needs to be without a crisis management team. Crisis management can't function without a business resilience team, and so on. Each team relies on the others to make sure customers feel safe and secure. Whenever you're dealing with a cyber incident, you're dealing with a risk to the business and a potential hit to customer trust. If someone hacks into a hospital, that's a crisis at hand. Your crisis team needs to be ready, and your cyber team is right there defending and making sure it goes no further. It all rolls up into the same goal.
Q: Is there anything that doesn't survive the transfer between cyber and resilience?
Ayana: What transfers is that you have different teams who each have a strong understanding of their role. In cyber you have your SOC teams, your offensive security teams, your defensive security teams. In risk you have your business resilience team, your ops resilience team. Teams working together, each knowing exactly what they need to do. That carries all the way across cyber, risk, and crisis management. One thing that doesn't transfer is the structure. In cyber, each team tends to have its own leader, a head of offensive security, a head of red team, a head of pen testing. In risk, a bunch of different teams roll up into one person, a director of business resilience or director of crisis management, with a lead or two underneath feeding directly up. In cyber there's a head for each segment.
What good looks like
Q: What separates a customer who gets real value from simulations from one who doesn't?
Ayana: The customers who get the most value are the ones willing to engage honestly. They don't treat the simulation like a performance, where we push it so you know the answers, you get everything right, and we check the box because we have to. They treat it as a safe place to find gaps before the real events come. And things are going to come. There will be cyber attacks, political fallout, riots, things that happen in this world. The customers who take it seriously and stay honest see the best value. They're curious. They want to know what we learned, not just what we passed. And they're willing to bring the right people into the room, even if that means exposing some uncomfortable truths. That mindset makes a huge difference.
Q: HackerOne built a business on organizations volunteering to have their weaknesses found. What did that teach you about earning trust?
Ayana: See something, say something. What stood out about that organization is that they really are making the internet a safer place. You want to be honest. At HackerOne there were customers willing to go to a forum after they'd patched a vulnerability and talk openly about it, to help other organizations avoid the same thing. That built real trust in the industry. When a large company does that, others think, this big company is doing it, I wouldn't mind helping out another organization if we ran into the same vulnerability. It was tough, because the word hacker makes people shake in their boots, but the people in that community were so passionate about helping organizations be as strong as possible, and it didn't matter if you were a startup or a Fortune 100. HackerOne put that openness out publicly, and we ran our own bug bounty too. As you lead, you want to be doing the same things you're asking your customers and your team to do. HackerOne did a really good job of leading and exposing themselves, and that shaped how their customers went about it.
Leadership and judgment
Q: What's a widely shared piece of customer success advice you think is wrong?
Ayana: A big misconception is that customer success is only about being responsive or helpful or reactive. Those things matter, but they're the baseline. The whole organization should be doing that anyway. Strong customer success is much more strategic. It's about understanding a customer's goals, anticipating what they'll need next, and connecting the product to a bigger business outcome. That means understanding their business initiatives and how our solution fits into them, and showing the value coming back from that partnership. Sometimes that means answering questions quickly. Other times it means slowing the conversation down and helping them make a better decision. It's not just, there's a fire, let me help put it out, or sitting and answering emails all day. It's being proactive, getting to know your customer's business like the back of your hand, keeping up with them, even getting news alerts when something's happening with them, and building strong relationships. The stronger the relationship, the more they trust you, and the better that partnership goes over time.
Q: Tell me about a time an account was at risk.
Ayana: In a prior role, there was a customer receiving a ton of vulnerabilities, to the point where they were overwhelmed. They wanted to slow down and pause their program. They started saying, maybe we're not ready for this kind of exposure, maybe we should take these funds back internally to our security engineering team. It's understandable to feel overwhelmed, but you need that information. You want to see where the flaws are, because if you can find them yourself before they get into the wrong hands, you avoid exploitation, people going on Twitter asking for millions of dollars. So the way I got them to walk back off the ledge was to say, instead of putting all of your assets in scope for researchers, why don't we put up only your top three to five high-priority flagship assets, see what we can pull from there, and break it into phases? A crawl, walk, run approach. Originally they said we're ready, let's put everything out there, and that wasn't a good idea. So we reeled them back, started with three, worked through those, and once the vulnerabilities stopped coming on those, added another three, and so on.
Q: How do you draw the line between a systems solution and a pragmatic one when a customer wants everything at once?
Ayana: For me it comes down to being completely honest with my customers and understanding, and this is the golden question everyone in CS has to ask, what does success really look like for you? It's different for every organization and every team. When you dig deeply into that answer, okay, we want to make sure our team is strong enough, we want to identify our gaps, I'll ask, are there any recent gaps you've had exploited that are top of mind? Getting into as much detail as possible helps them step back and think, okay, let's still work toward the big goal, but let's break it into smaller subsections so we can control it, take time to work through it, coach and teach our teams internally, and keep moving forward.
What's next
Q: What have you changed your mind about in the last year?
Ayana: I've changed my mind about how quickly customers need to move from planning to testing. You'll have customers who spend half their contract planning and trying to perfect everything, and then you look up and it's, wait, where's our return on investment, let's get started. I used to think more preparation made for better output. Now I think there's a point where over-preparing slows down the actual learning and the return on investment. You need enough structure to make a simulation meaningful and pull information from it, but you don't need perfection. Some of the best insights come from customers who are willing to test something before every detail is buttoned up.
Over-preparing can really slow down your progress and your learning.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
Ayana: I like to do everything. My selling point that I always end up mentioning is that I enjoy working out. I'm actually a professional bodybuilder in the women's physique division for the IFBB. I genuinely love it, it's one of my favorite parts of the day. I know that sounds crazy, but it's my space for meditation. Just me, my headphones, and some weights, and a really fun way to relieve stress. Outside of that, I enjoy camping. I recently got into actual tent camping instead of glamping, and this year I've camped seven times in a real tent and loved it. I also enjoy fashion, believe it or not. I love putting together pieces you wouldn't expect to work and trying them out, and doing the same for friends who ask me to help pick their outfits. And then traveling, and being home with my three weenie dogs and my partner. Those are my favorite things.
