23 Nov 2024

Membership Meeting 11/20/2024

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Topic: Zero Trust Methodology with a Heavy Push into SASE

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face increasing pressure to maintain robust cybersecurity practices while adopting cloud services, SaaS platforms, and AI tools. This presentation examines critical security practices that businesses should implement in 2024, highlighting how traditional security risks have transformed with the shift to third-party services. Through real-world examples of breaches and near-misses, we explore the often-overlooked risks in common business tools, the challenges of vendor risk management, and the critical importance of maintaining defensible security practices. Special attention is given to upmarket growth challenges, where larger clients demand extensive security documentation and proof of controls, along with emerging considerations for AI security policy. By understanding and implementing these essential security measures, businesses can better position themselves for growth while protecting against evolving cyber threats and meeting increasingly stringent client security requirements.

Speaker: Shawn Slater, Network Security Practice Lead, GuidePoint Security 

Shawn Slater, Practice Lead, Network Security has been working in the fields of networking and information security since 2006. He has a strong routing and switching background with various vendor technologies from Cisco, Juniper, and others leading him to pursue increased responsibilities in the network security space. Beginning with Juniper Netscreen and Cisco ASA firewalls earlier in his career, his focus is Next Generation firewall technologies from vendors such as Palo Alto Networks. His experience on both the Enterprise and value-added resellers (VAR) sides includes countless successful deployments and migrations of multiple firewall technologies to these next generation platforms. With the growth of the Public Cloud, he focused on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, deploying all manner of Next Generation firewalls in traditional Transit VPC/VNET and Gateway Load Balancer designs. His experience crosses internationally to all areas of industry including education and government (i.e., U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Federal Reserve Bank), Kimpton Hotels, and the Export Import Bank of the United States. Shawn is focused on efficiently delivering the right solution for the customer while ensuring the maintaining staff is properly trained to manage and support it.

Shawn holds active certifications and accreditations from numerous security and network vendors including Cisco with the CCNP Routing and Switching and CCNP Security as well as numerous with Palo Alto including Palo Alto Certified Network Security Engineer (PCNSE), Palo Alto Certified Network Security Consultant (PCNSC) and the PSE: Professional series for Platform, Endpoint and Data Center/Cloud.

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