The Risk Apogee

Public sector cybersecurity leaders face a resource equation that doesn't exist in the private sector: every security investment is weighed directly against public safety, housing, and essential city services. Austin Davis is the CISO for the City of San Jose, the twelfth largest city in the United States, and a veteran whose career spans military service, law enforcement, and enterprise secu...

Promoting someone based on what they can execute tactically tells you very little about whether they'll succeed at the next level. Teddra Burgess spent nearly three decades in enterprise technology sales and public sector strategy before founding Chasing Outcomes, an executive advisory and federal go-to-market consulting firm. Teddra sits down with MK Palmore to unpack why corporate leadershi...

Organizations across the defense industrial base, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are treating compliance frameworks as the ceiling of their security investment rather than the floor, and doing so while geopolitical adversaries are already inside their supply chains. Michael McLaughlin sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, law, and national security, and in this conversation he walks...

Most organizations still manage human risk by training employees and hoping the behavior changes. That approach has never been grounded in evidence, and AI is making it dangerously obsolete. Oz Alashe is the founder and CEO of CybSafe, a behavioral AI security company that treats human risk as a measurable, data-driven variable rather than a compliance checkbox. A former lieutenant colonel in the...

The market rewards speed over security, and most executive teams are making resource decisions accordingly, but that trade-off becomes existential when adversaries are stockpiling encrypted data and quantum computing is approaching viability. Kathryn Wang is the Principal Public Sector Lead at SandboxAQ, CEO of CTRL+Alt+Defeat,io, and a board advisor whose career spans cybersecurity partnerships,...

State governments are under pressure to adopt AI, strengthen cyber resilience, and build workforce pipelines, all at the same time, and without leaving communities behind. In this conversation recorded live at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco, MK Palmore sits down with Maryland Lieutenant Governor Aruna Miller, Secretary of Labor Portia Wu, and Secretary of Commerce Harry Coker. They discuss w...

The CISO role is caught between rising personal liability, tactical overload, and a business landscape that still treats security as a technology function rather than an enterprise risk discipline. Aaron Wurthmann is a fractional security leader with nearly 30 years of experience spanning IT operations, DevOps, and security leadership across Silicon Valley startups and maturing organizations. In t...

Most enterprise security spending goes toward bolting defensive tools onto software that was never built to be safe in the first place, and board conversations rarely question whether that's the right fight. Bob Lord has spent his career at the center of that question, serving as the first security hire at Twitter, Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, CISO at the Democratic National C...