Patrick Neise Joins Groove as Chief Information Security Officer

Former Director of Operations for NSA Red Team to strengthen Groove’s industry-leading security in a world of increasing threats

Groove, a market-leading sales engagement platform for enterprises using Salesforce,  announced Patrick Neise has joined the company as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Patrick is a former Director of Operations for the NSA Red Team with deep expertise in protecting information systems from cyber threats at the highest level.

As CISO at Groove, Patrick is committed to implementing systems and technology to ensure that the company’s systems remain hardened against the ever-evolving and expanding security threats targeted at SaaS companies.

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“Groove’s commitment to security begins with its unique architecture, and I look forward to helping Groove further harden its information systems as we continue to grow the company, product offerings, and customer base,” said Patrick Neise, CISO at Groove. “Groove made some smart decisions early on that have enabled it to meet the demands of its most demanding and security-minded customers. It’s my job to implement the systems and controls to ensure we’re always one step ahead of both customer needs and emerging threats.”

Groove stands out as the only enterprise sales engagement platform that is built natively on Salesforce, which eliminates the risks introduced by syncing with third-party databases. In addition to the security features of its platform, Groove is SOC2 Type 11 certified and is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other global privacy laws.

“Patrick’s in-the-trenches experience at the NSA protecting our nation’s most valuable assets from cyber threats might seem like overkill for a software company, but security has always been a central pillar of our platform,” said Chris Rothstein, CEO and Co-founder of Groove. “It’s a big win to add his deep security expertise to our leadership team. The security needs of the large and complex enterprises we serve are only going to get more stringent, and Patrick is the perfect person to ensure we can meet them all.”

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Security is Built into the Foundation of Groove’s Sales Engagement Platform

Groove was architectured to meet the rigorous security standards required by financial services firms, large enterprises, and other organizations needing to operate in highly secure environments. Compared to other enterprise sales engagement platforms, Groove stands in three major ways:

• Groove stores only a fraction of the PII required by other SEPs. Groove limits what we store to metadata about the given activities and none of the email/event bodies.
• Groove maintains Salesforce as the system of record. This allows companies to keep their most critical data within the security protocols they’ve established in Salesforce. The limited amount of information stored in Groove is encrypted at rest and protected by TLS in transit.
• Groove uses the user’s own Salesforce and Google or Microsoft Graph tokens for all user-level API access. Existing access controls in those systems are honored by default.