Top 2024 Cybersecurity Trends Series – Session #2: Cybersecurity Consolidation – Perspectives from Intel’s CISO & New Research

Brent Conran is a Vice President of Information Technology, General Manager of IT’s Infrastructure and Information Security (I2) organization, and the Chief Information Security Officer for Intel Corporation. Long a champion of cybersecurity, his in-depth knowledge of both technology and business helps him drive and manage organization-wide infrastructure and information security programs aligned with business strategies. Brent engages and educates stakeholders, finding ways to invest in IT compute capabilities and mitigate and reduce risk while balancing security and business needs.

Brent is both responsible for safeguarding Intel’s corporate assets, intellectual property, and computer systems, and for the availability and evolution of Intel’s robust enterprise infrastructure. Brent leads a large, global organization of employees enabling Intel’s workforce to connect, collaborate, and compute in modernized and increasingly more secure ways.

Brent brings a unique combination of pragmatism and practicality based on years of experience in business, government, and financial services. He works closely with Intel employees and executives, government agencies and local, state, and federal law enforcement to ensure optimum security. Prior to Intel, He served as Chief Security Officer at McAfee. Before joining McAfee, he held dual responsibilities as both the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Information Security Officer for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he managed the IT operations necessary to facilitate a robust computing environment for the Members of Congress. He served as Security Architect for Merrill Lynch Private Client Group, was a security architect for the Pinnacle Alliance at J.P. Morgan, worked as a white hat hacker with CSC Hack Pack, and was instrumental in evolving the SEA Sparrow Missile WAN for NATO.

Brent holds a bachelor’s degree from Towson University and has earned numerous certifications in the security industry, including Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), and Checkpoint Certified Security Expert (CCSE). He received the Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT award for IT Innovation and is consistently ranked as one of Security 500’s Top Security Professionals in Information Technology.

Chris Kissel is a Research Vice President in IDC's Security & Trust Products group, responsible for cybersecurity technology analysis, emerging trends, and market share reporting. His primary research area is Tier 2 security operations center (SOC) analytics. The major technology groups within this practice are SOAR, network intelligence and threat analytics (NITA), and XDR. Chris also contributes to the IDC SIEM, device and application vulnerability practices. The Tier 2 SOC analytics service effectively covers the processes SOC analysts employ to monitor, detect, remediate, and mitigate threat actors attempting to attack a network within a security and vulnerability management and security analytics paradigm.

Previously, Chris was a Senior Analyst at Frost & Sullivan where his main area of coverage was SVM-related technologies: vulnerability management (VM), security information and event management (SIEM), network access control (NAC), network security forensics, and incident detection and response (IDR) platforms. Prior to Frost & Sullivan, he was a Senior Analyst for In-Stat in LTE and Cellular Infrastructure — this practice included base station deployments, spectrum licensing, and cellular backhaul. Chris covered PC chipsets, multimedia applications such as PC-TV tuners and Blu-ray DVD.

Scott Simkin is Vice President, Head of Portfolio Marketing at CrowdStrike. He brings deep cybersecurity expertise to the intersection of category creation, driving outsized revenue growth and building successful teams. Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Scott served in marketing leadership roles at Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks, where his team introduced the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) category to the market and ran portfolios covering Zero Trust network access, secure web gateway, security orchestration automation and response (SOAR), endpoint security, user behavior analytics, network traffic analysis, threat intelligence, and IoT security, among others. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Scott held various leadership positions at Cisco, focused on network security and enterprise wireless. Scott holds a B.A. in marketing from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.