Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and your journey of becoming a CISO at Secure Data Technologies
I am a husband and father of 3 great young adults: 23-year-old twins (my son is a firefighter/paramedic and my daughter is a nurse) and a 20-year-old college student (Aerospace Engineer major).
I have close to 30 years of experience in IT. My background is pretty diverse. When I started off I thought I wanted to a Doctorate and several years into it I decided that I want to switch careers and get into technology. Instantly I was hooked. Very early in my career the opportunity to take on a security-focused role presented itself. I jumped at it and that catapulted my career.
I have traveled the world and spoken at many boardroom tables, conferences, and courtrooms about my knowledge and expertise in security. I now get to share that knowledge with an amazing organization here at Secure Data Technologies and our clients.
With your extensive technological background, what drew you into working for Secure Data Technologies and what does your role within such a diverse service provider entail?
What drew me to Secure Data was the culture. We are like a large family here. From day one I have felt a feeling of togetherness from all. My role is to help drive our Security practice to our clients as well as internally develop our practice with the rest of our team.
What are the most significant changes you expect to see in your business as a result of the globally increasing cyber threats and attacks?
I see our most significant change being growth. We have been seeing this trend happen within Secure Data over the last few years and we are just scratching the surface. There are some very exciting things happening right now and our team is only going to see us expand our coverage and knowledge more by doing so.
What do you think the biggest pain points are in the market in GRC, generally and from your experience with your current clients?
A lot of the challenges that we see stem from a lack of personnel to help organizations get to where they need or want to get from a GRC standpoint. Also, in general, we see over the next few years the institution of new local privacy laws per state increase drastically. Staying abreast of these laws and the overall federal mandates are going to be time and resource consuming not to mention international mandates as well.
On a more personal note, what is something surprising you’ve learned this past year that our readers would benefit from knowing?
As of late, I have found myself drawn to the AI (artificial intelligence) space. As a Security Professional, I want to know where its risks are, how it may help us with our jobs, or how it may make our jobs more difficult. The fact that AI can be used to do nefarious acts should be alarming to all and we need to keep our finger on this one. I try to spend as much time as I can educating myself on this ahead of time so as to not find myself having to catch up on it because an event happened on my watch.
