Logs are the notes machines leave for themselves. Most of the time, nobody wants to read them. Then a checkout page stalls, a cloud service blinks, or a suspicious login arrives at 2:13 in the morning, and those dull lines of data become the only witnesses in the room. Liz Shulof's present job is to make that invisible evidence legible before panic supplies its own punctuation.
As chief marketing officer of Sumo Logic, Shulof owns the company's global brand and marketing strategy across security and observability. This means selling a platform whose raw material is exhaust from software, and whose promise is clarity. She called it the “infinite power of logs” when she joined in January 2024. It is an elegant phrase for an ungainly category, the sort of linguistic compression that comes from a career spent translating technology for people who have meetings to get to.
Her résumé looks tidy in retrospect: communications at Purdue, more than five years in strategy and technology consulting at Accenture, technology public relations at Greenough Communications, then leadership roles in enterprise security. The lived version was messier and more interesting. Companies merged. Products multiplied. A familiar name disappeared. Shulof did not simply promote those changes from the perimeter. She grew inside them.
The unusual luxury of staying
Shulof joined Bomgar in 2010 as director of public relations. Bomgar made remote-support software, useful machinery with a name that sounded more like a comic-book noise than an enterprise-security vendor. She took on wider responsibilities over time. By 2014 she was vice president of marketing communications. In 2016, she was tapped to lead the global marketing organization. By 2018, she was chief marketing officer.
In technology, tenure is sometimes mistaken for stasis. Shulof's 13 years offer the opposite case. Staying placed her close to the compound action: products gaining customers, colleagues gaining judgment, and a company gaining parts faster than its old identity could comfortably contain them. After Bomgar acquired three companies, she helped lead the integration and the 2019 launch of BeyondTrust as the name for the combined business.
Strategy and technology consulting at Accenture, followed by technology communications at Greenough.
Joins Bomgar as director of PR and begins a 13-year run.
Takes charge of global marketing, becomes CMO and helps bring acquired companies under the BeyondTrust brand.
Joins Sumo Logic to lead global brand and marketing across security and observability.
A merger creates a peculiar writing assignment. Legal entities may combine overnight; shared meaning does not. Each acquired team arrives with customers who trust an old name, employees who know an old story and products carrying their own vocabulary. A rebrand can make the organization look unified several quarters before it feels unified. The work is part editorial judgment, part diplomacy, part cartography. Decide what survives. Explain where everyone now stands. Avoid producing a sentence so abstract that even its author cannot find the door.
Shulof's background fit the moment. Consulting had taught her to see a business as a system. Public relations had taught her how a story travels outside the building. A long tenure had taught her where the emotional cables ran inside it. The BeyondTrust launch required all three.
“While I am honored to receive this recognition, it reflects the combined effort of the entire BeyondTrust team.”Liz Shulof, on being named among the Top 100 Women in Cybersecurity in 2020
Marketing before the ask
One of the sharper clues to Shulof's operating style comes from a smaller campaign, years before the C-suite title. In December 2014, Bomgar ran “The 5 Days of Bomgar,” a holiday program for customer advocates. Participants did more than click a like button. They uploaded photographs, left comments, made videos and shared their IT resolutions. Participation rose 234 percent over the previous holiday effort.
The tempting lesson is to copy the game mechanics. The better lesson is what happened before December. Bomgar's advocacy team had spent the year building relationships, so customers were ready when invited to contribute. Shulof described the objective plainly: get customers, fans and evangelists talking. The program worked because those nouns referred to actual people, not segments waiting in a spreadsheet.
Another anniversary campaign made the same point with more birthday cake. To mark Bomgar's tenth year, the team gathered customer photos and videos, visited service-desk teams and invited a customer into the company celebration. The campaign received Shorty Awards recognition. Its charmingly un-enterprise premise was that customers might enjoy being part of the story, rather than being placed below a testimonial mark and politely laminated.
That instinct scales. At a customer conference in 2022, BeyondTrust mixed technical certification, product sessions and partner feedback with a Women in Tech gathering and book signing. Shulof received the first signature from author Tarah Wheeler. Later came an eighties party and a baby-pink 1957 Thunderbird, because even privileged-access management occasionally needs shoulder pads.
The credit travels outward
In 2020, Cyber Defense Magazine named Shulof among its Top 100 Women in Cybersecurity. Her public response redirected the honor to the combined BeyondTrust team. She also spoke about creating meaningful opportunities for a diverse pool of candidates, including women, and welcomed the growing number of women in the company's technical departments.
Corporate language about people can become polished into weightlessness. The more persuasive evidence arrived when Shulof left. In her farewell post, she wrote that she was indebted to the people who had shaped her 13-year run and would remain their “biggest fan.” Former colleagues answered with specifics. One thanked her for investing in the sales development team and making time when her attention was in demand. Another remembered being empowered to run with large ideas and receiving advice about showing up as a woman leader. Public comments are not an employee survey, but details like these are hard to manufacture by committee.
There is a through-line here. Customers become advocates after a year of relationship-building. Acquired teams become a company after someone respects the stories they carried in. Employees become leaders after being trusted with an idea before every edge has been sanded smooth. The marketing work and the management work share an ingredient: attention paid before it is urgently needed.
A brand is what remains after the launch meeting ends and people decide whether the new story includes them.
Finding the signal at Sumo Logic
Shulof closed her BeyondTrust chapter in December 2023 and announced the next one weeks later. Sumo Logic operates in a market crowded with alerting tools, security acronyms and promises to tame complexity. Its platform brings machine data together so development, security and operations teams can investigate what is happening across cloud systems. The technical subject changed. The narrative problem was familiar.
Her stated plan was collaborative: work with the go-to-market team, customers and partners to chart new territory, elevate the brand and take the company forward. Since then, her public updates have stayed close to the junction between technical capability and human overload. She highlighted new Dojo AI agents meant to reduce alert fatigue and speed security investigations. She shared research from more than 500 IT and security leaders about sprawling tools and poor communication. The product promise is not more data. Nobody has put that on a wish list. It is a better route from data to judgment.
This may be why Shulof's career feels coherent despite the corporate transformations. At Accenture, the raw material was business complexity. In public relations, it was technical language. At Bomgar and BeyondTrust, it was a growing portfolio and a changing identity. At Sumo Logic, it is an ocean of machine events. Each assignment asks the same question: what matters here, and how can people see it together?
Her path also complicates the familiar idea that a marketer should arrive with a finished answer. Shulof's most visible work suggests a more useful sequence: learn the system, learn the people, and only then name the thing. That order is slower than commissioning a new wordmark. It is faster than repairing a story nobody inside the company believes. In security software, where credibility is borrowed from engineers, practitioners and customers, fluency cannot be faked for long. The communications craft matters because the listening came first.
The answer rarely arrives as a slogan. It is built over years, in campaigns customers choose to join, in colleagues trusted to run, and in a rebrand that gives four histories one future tense. There are louder routes to executive influence. Shulof's has been patient, social and unusually attentive to the handoff between meaning and action. The machines can keep producing the logs. Her work begins when humans need the story.