TAMPA BAY, FL.  – March 21, 2017

Carpenter will help guide innovation and evolve KnowBe4’s ‘new-school’ approach to the human element of security

Perry Carpenter, former Research Director, Security & Risk Management and esteemed analyst at Gartner, has joined KnowBe4 as Chief Evangelist and Strategy Officer. As the provider of the most popular platform for security awareness training and simulated phishing, KnowBe4 developed this new role to strengthen innovation and lead efforts to evolve how the human element of security is approached. Carpenter brings a unique point of view to help KnowBe4 and its customers achieve an even higher degree of success and effectiveness.

“KnowBe4 is very happy to welcome Perry. He has personally run security awareness and culture transformation programs at multiple Fortune 500 organizations, covered and analyzed the entirety of the market and helped security leaders globally with these programs while at Gartner,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4. “His keen insight will help us continue our extraordinary momentum and increase our efforts with larger enterprises.”

Prior to joining KnowBe4, Carpenter served as Research Director, Security and Risk Management at Gartner, closely covering several security markets including information security technologies, security training technologies and CISO perspectives on purchasing. Carpenter has also had information security roles at Alltel Telecommunications, Fidelity Information Services and Walmart, giving him the user experience and understanding of the people in information security. Carpenter will take this knowledge and apply it to his role at KnowBe4.

KnowBe4’s recent efforts to drive growth in new-school security awareness training have landed it at #139 on the Inc 500 list, # 50 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 and #38 on the Cybersecurity Ventures Cybersecurity 500. Focusing on the human element, new-school security awareness training, has seen significant growth over the past five years because it’s more effective than the old break room approach. Users see Phish-prone percentages go from an average of 15 to 20 percent down to one to two percent after a year.