SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

James Christiansen, Vice President, Cloud Security Transformation, Netskope

James Christiansen is Netskope’s vice president of cloud security transformation and leader of the Chief Strategy Office. He is focused on enhancing the sales staff reach into Netskope’s global clients and helping drive thought leadership in cloud security transformation.

James brings extensive expertise as a global leader in information security. Prior to joining Netskope, he was vice president CISO at Teradata where he led the global security, physical, and information security teams. Previously, James was vice president of information risk management at Optiv, chief information risk officer for Evantix, and CISO at Experian Americas, General Motors, and Visa International.

As a sought-after expert speaker on security, James has been featured at numerous prestigious events, including the Business Roundtable, Research Board, American Bar Association, American Banker, the RSA Conference, BankInfoSecurity, ISSA, ISACA, HIMSS, and MIS Training Institute. He has also been featured in The New York Times and quoted as an expert in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, United States Cybersecurity Magazine, Bloomberg, and Healthcare IT News.

James is a patent inventor and has received three innovation awards in cyber security, GRC, and cloud computing. He is the author of the Internet Survival Series and contributing author of CISO Essentials, as well as numerous industry papers.

George Finney, Chief Security Officer, Southern Methodist University

The Information Security team, under the leadership of George Finney, is responsible for implementing and monitoring a diverse security infrastructure to protect the University network and data. The Security team is responsible for recommending security architectures, providing centralized database security, reviewing vendor security, capturing security logs, overseeing security investigations, and managing various security technologies.

Matt Johnson, Systems Engineer, Illumio

Matt Johnson is a Regional Systems Engineer at Illumio. He focuses on evangelizing the benefits of micro-segmentation as well as working with Illumio customers to implement successful segmentation projects. Prior to Illumio, Matt was at AHEAD helping partners with enterprise IT organizations to drive cloud adoption and acceleration.

Derek Milroy, Enterprise Security Architect, U.S. Cellular

Derek has been implementing security in corporate environments, as both an internal employee and a consultant, for five years. Although he has implemented firewalls, IDSs, and VPNs for various employers and clients he focuses heavily on securing Microsoft hosts and Domain structures. He has hardened hundreds of hosts in environments ranging from less than a dozen servers to enterprise environments with over 1000 servers and thousands of users. In conjunction with hardening he has also crafted and implemented standards, policies, and procedures to maintain the security of his employer’s / client’s environments.

Nabil Zoldjalali, Director of Cloud Security, Darktrace

Based in Toronto, Nabil specializes in the application of cloud technologies and works closely with Darktrace’s Research & Development team. He advises strategic Fortune 500 customers across North America on advanced threat detection, cyber AI, and Autonomous Response for cloud and SaaS environments. Nabil is a frequent speaker at leading industry conferences across North America, including Microsoft Ignite, Black Hat, and the World AI Forum. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from McGill University and is an advisory board member of the EC Council.

Annur Sumar, CTO, Maetech; Microsoft MVP, Former Vice President of IT D&P

Annur Sumar is a Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP and technology consultant in the areas of Infrastructure Design, Enterprise Content Management, CRM, Microsoft Azure, System Center and Cloud Technologies. Annur is an industry recognized leader and independent speaker around strategic service automation, technology driven process improvements, IT service alignment, engineering best practices and operations management. All of which are targeted in his presentations to helping businesses with complex IT environments lower Total Cost of Ownership and raising Return On Investments.

Prior to joining a Microsoft Partner Consulting firm, Annur served as a Vice President of Technology for Duff & Phelps. One of the world’s leading independent financial advisory firms serving client needs in the areas of valuation, investment banking, transaction advice, and dispute consulting. During his tenure at Duff & Phelps, Annur worked closely with Microsoft product teams and case study managers in providing invaluable feedback around how businesses such as his were able to benefit from cloud technologies that were molded into business solutions. As a Microsoft MVP and industry expert, Annur brings 10 years of experience to work actively with other MVPs and Microsoft Partners to provide industry insight and strategic direction.