
The Cyberhaven CEO has built and sold two companies by noticing where enterprise software was heading. His latest bet is that protecting files is no longer enough when data travels through people, prompts, and autonomous agents.
Howard Ting is the CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity-security company building a unified control plane for access governance. He took the top job in November 2025 after more than five years running Cyberhaven and two-plus decades scaling category-defining security and enterprise-software companies including Palo Alto Networks, Nutanix, Redis, Zscaler, and RSA Security. A marketing-and-product operator who once demoed Azure Active Directory on stage with Bill Gates, Ting now bets that the hardest unsolved problem in security is authorization: deciding what any human, service, or AI agent should be allowed to do, and for how long.