WHO TELLS US ABOUT LIFE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICE .

In security , people are often enamoured by our ‘ war stories ’, but when asked what my greatest achievements are , ^{I refer to people . I have had a lot of}

young engineers join my teams , eager to learn and innovate , then grow through coaching , mentoring and experience to become CISOs , start-up founders , engineering executives , etc . Watching them grow and succeed in their careers , having played a hand in developing their talents , are my greatest achievements .

What first made you think of a career in cybersecurity ?

There are two things that motivated and influence every job I ’ ve taken : a feel-good reason for joining an organisation , that it would have a positive impact on society ; and an ‘ economies of scale ’ impact , bringing real change to larger populations .

The first taste I had was when I worked across a network of 12 Native American tribes with the broad remit of helping their communities and reservations to overcome their digital divide . Some of these tribes didn ’ t have access to a basic Internet connection because they didn ’ t have the infrastructure . My work as CIO for these tribes was focused on setting up the technology infrastructure and services and also in promoting digital literacy – training youth to be equipped to join the tech workforce .

Next , as a security executive at Salesforce , I was attracted to what cloud computing might do for humanity by democratising cloud services . Most companies could not maintain or afford secure and scalable infrastructure . Salesforce would use cloud computing to help companies achieve something with technology that they couldn ’ t do on their own , as well as a global scale and level of security not fathomable by most companies in the world . Providing security for the cloud , this was an economy of scale value proposition that I was completely energised by .

What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position ?

Traditional security practices tend to isolate security and make it solely techfocused or solely compliance-focused

– my management style differs from this . I build security teams that are also people-centric .

Those that work on my teams get professional development training so they can influence and engage with non-technical audiences to influence them to be more secure . You can have the smartest security engineers in the world , but if they can ’ t influence a business to make more secure decisions , then secure outcomes aren ’ t going to be accomplished .

What do you think is the current hot cybersecurity talking point ?

That depends on which community we ’ re talking to . For example , in Europe the hot talking point is that modern companies who are adopting cloud and enterprise SaaS are effectively taking advantage of security economies of scale that modern software provides . www . intelligentciso . com

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