My fascination with technology started in junior high school, when I began building homegrown audio systems, installing burglar alarms, and constructing computational circuits out of 7400 series TTL ICs from Radio Shack. Those hobbyist experiences led me into computer science, NASA/JPL funded graduate work and a doctorate in software engineering, with significant immersion in scientific visualization, artificial intelligence, design theory, and resilient systems architecture. Throughout my career, I have worked in academia, medical information systems, enterprise IT, security, privacy, and compliance. I was a co-founder and CTO of ConfigureSoft — focusing on configuration management and compliance — which was later acquired by EMC. I spent several years in the Office of the CTO within RSA, working on security configuration analysis, security automation, security architecture modeling, security information standards and helping to build out the advanced threat portfolio. At VMware, I work on the role of virtualization and the hosting platform in transforming security. I concentrate on addressing security complexity, security automation and security analytics, collaborating with VMware business units, VMware partners, NIST, MITRE, OASIS, the National Science Foundation, and national defense/security organizations.
Misconfiguration remains a haunting and treacherous security challenge, despite the industry’s heroic efforts to overcome it. Record-level investment, rapid controls innovation, advances in analytics, intensive...
