Speaker: Benjamin Blakely, Director of Information Security at Workiva
Abstract: There has never been a stronger need for skilled Cyber Security experts in the workplace than right now. Those experts need to be armed with solid research, data and tools to protect the organizations they serve. At the same time, it can be hard for someone aspiring to such a role to fully understand the realities of how Information Security happens in a corporate setting. Workiva is an extreme example of the IT challenges faced by businesses today. This talk will highlight some ways we’ve approached these challenges and research topics that we believe would be valuable for companies heavily using Cloud technologies or DevOps pipelines.
Bio: Benjamin Blakely is the Director of Information Security at Workiva. He holds a CISM, CISSP and a doctorate in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University where he worked on ISEAGE with Doug Jacobson while researching attack attribution, and holds a patent on encryption key management in the cloud. He has worked in the private, public and education sectors, including some of the highest‐security environments in the world. Workiva created Wdesk, a cloud‐based platform for enterprises to collect, manage, report and analyze business data in real time. Wdesk includes a sophisticated productivity suite for business data collaboration and reporting that is used by thousands of corporations, including more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500.