CISO Dinner

Ray Austad began his IT and Information Security career in Higher Education and Non-Profit, and pivoted over to financial enterprise after 18 years. Commencing his career with Zurich Farmers Insurance’s Group Information Security as a Business Information Security Officer. In 2014 he joined the Farmers Insurance Group Business Unit to lead Cloud and Application Security, Vulnerability Management, and Incident Response. In 2020 Ray took a different view of Cybersecurity and risks to business by moving over to Farmers Risk Management team. As Director Information Security and Risk Management, the next chapter started with being able to evaluate the organization with a new and intriguing lens. The first quarter was allocated to learning more about Enterprise Risk Management and adjusting to a role of business assurance, opposed to operational execution. The second quarter changed the organization and our personal lives with the pandemic, and provided new, unforeseen challenges. However this offered new opportunities to calculate organization and supplier risks, and view business resiliency differently. Heading into the third quarter, the focus will be on continued improvements with information security risk baselines, collaboration with our operational and business partners to monitor pandemic impacts, and evaluate new and emerging risks.

Brian Nmezi is Director of Risk and Security at TaxBit. He has over a decade of experience in technical security and GRC where he has built operational security teams, implemented effective detection and response programs, managed risk management teams, and operationalized incident response procedures. Brian has a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science, and Masters of Science in Cybersecurity and Data Assurance.

I have spent the last 15 years of my career helping security teams at Fortune 500 companies through their worst days and using that knowledge to build trailblazing, data-driven products to help prevent them. And somewhere along the way I co-founded a brewery in China.