Why this episode matters

• Shows a realistic CISO journey. From reading Applied Cryptography on deployment to earning certs and taking a consulting role just to get a foot in the door at Microsoft.
• Clarifies what “security operations” actually covers. Not just a SOC – but monitoring, detection, vulnerability management, red teaming and close collaboration with engineering and infrastructure.
• Frames why CISOs must stay technical. In an AI heavy world you cannot lead security if you do not understand LLMs, prompt injection and how these systems fail in practice.
• Gives a practical view of AI in the SOC. AI reduces alert fatigue and speeds triage yet still needs human oversight for actions that carry real risk or business impact.
• Offers concrete career advice. From portfolios and GitHub repos to writing whitepapers and blogs that show what you can really do, instead of only listing certifications.
• Highlights veterans as a talent pool. Discipline, playbook driven execution and operating under pressure map directly to tier one SOC and incident response work.

Copy paste takeaways for your team

• Make “stay technical” an explicit expectation for security leaders – especially around AI, automation and cloud native architectures.
• Define security operations clearly for your org: which parts sit with the CISO function and which remain in platform or infra engineering.
• Treat AI as a force multiplier in the SOC: use it for summarization, enrichment and correlation while keeping humans in the decision loop for changes and containment.
• Build structured partnerships with engineering and operations instead of throwing vulnerabilities over the wall – agree criteria, SLAs and shared priorities in advance.
• When hiring, look for candidates who are self critical and aware of their own liabilities, not just eager to talk about their strengths.
• For entry level roles, value portfolios (labs, code, blogs, writeups) at least as much as certificates – they show how people think and execute.

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