Incredible New Possibilities

By Mark Weatherford

Mark Weatherford has more than 20 years of security operations leadership and executive-level policy experience in some of the largest and most critical public and private sector organizations in the world. In 2011, Weatherford was appointed by President Obama as the Department of Homeland Security’s first Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and before DHS, he was the Vice President and Chief Security Officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) where he directed the cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection program and worked with electric utility companies across North America. Prior to NERC, Weatherford was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to serve as California’s first Chief Information Security Officer and he also served as the first Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Colorado, where he was appointed by two successive governors. As a former U.S. Navy Cryptologic Officer, Weatherford led the United States Navy’s Computer Network Defense operations and the Naval Computer Incident Response Team (NAVCIRT). Weatherford serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University, the Board of Directors at the National Cybersecurity Center, is an Affiliate at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), an affiliate faculty member at the Desert Research Institute, and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Poneman Institute. He’s an investor in multiple technology startup companies and serves on the  Executive Advisory Boards of AlertEnterprise, BitGlass, Boldend, Chevron, Coalfire, Coventry, Cylance, and Indegy. He is also on an Advisory Board for Cyber-Enabled Economic Warfare at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  

Way back in the 18th century, Ben Franklin said, “Distrust and caution are the parents of security.” That insight is entirely appropriate in the 21st century as companies deliberately and thoughtfully seek to take advantage of the tremendous economic benefits of cloud computing. Migration to the cloud is exploding, and the recent Cisco Global Cloud Index projects that by 2019, four out of five data center workloads will be processed in the cloud and more than 83 percent of global data center traffic will come from cloud services and applications. That’s three short years away, and it makes Joe Weinman’s prediction that, “Ultimately, the cloud is the latest example of Schumpeterian creative destruction: creating wealth for those who exploit it; and leading to the demise of those that don’t,” a business imperative for strategically concerned companies today.

While the benefits of the cloud are profound, security continues to be a significant concern and impediment to wholesale and universal deployment of cloud services for most companies. Caution and an eyes-wide-open posture are more important than ever as organizations are being transformed and changing the way they interact, operate, and compete in the business environment.

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