Cyber Security Management Committee

Alex Woodward

Head of Cyber Security Services, CGI

Alex leads cyber security services for CGI IT in the UK. The group provides a balanced portfolio of services across a broad range of sectors from Defence and Intelligence, Central and Local Government, Energy and Utilities, Financial Services as well as the commercial sector. Engagements include the design and delivery of major transformational programmes, consultative assignments, and the provision of a range of operational security managed services.

Andrew Mallinson

Senior Research Scientist, Intel

Andrew Mallinson is a senior research scientist at Intel Corporation UK, with over 17 years of experience within the technology sector. His research interests and duties include conducting research and development into future computer architectures and associated software ecosystems. To enhance the current state of the art for extreme scale, high performance, data processing systems as well as the overall security of computing systems. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Intel he held a variety of technical roles with a significant cyber security focus, and worked on technical projects specific to the UK as well as liaising closely with international partners.

Chris Parker MBE

Director Government Strategy, Fortinet UK

Chris Parker MBE is a strategic leader who is currently UK Director, Government for Fortinet, the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world. Previously, Chris has designed and led international operations at national and multi-national level. Chris holds the NCSC strategic relationship for Fortinet and was recently invited by the MOD to be the Industry Lead for their complex MDI Programme (Digitization in MOD). He is a leading advocate of collaboration in industry and government and promotes sustainability and diversity in the Sector.

Dr Andy Lilly

CTO / Co-Founder, Armour Communications Limited SME

Andy is Director and Co-Founder of Armour Communications with a proven track record of delivering challenging, leading-edge research and development solutions into global markets. Having held leadership positions at multi-national organisations as well as VC-funded start-ups, Andy has a broad defence and cyber experience, from secret mobile comms systems to resilient satellite software, and from military phased array radars to commercial broadband mesh networks and in-home voice and video phones.

Andy is a key contributor to Armour’s work with the NCSC and UK government, as well Armour’s range of overseas customers, for which the company received the Queen’s Award for Export in 2022.

Dr Bernard Parsons

CEO, Becrypt SME

I am the CEO and a co-founder of Becrypt, a UK SME that develops and supplies a range of cyber security software products and services, primarily for critical national infrastructure organisations.

Originally Becrypt’s CTO, and with a career starting in academia, I continue to leverage my background in and passion for technology.

Dr Budgie Dhanda MBE

Digital Trust and Cyber Security, PA Consulting

I have over 25 years of experience of working in defence, national security and cyber security.  I have led sales and delivery into national programmes and I am currently leading a cyber project supporting the Department of Health and Social Care. I have also worked alongside the National Cyber Security Centre in raising awareness and understanding of cyber security and improving cyber maturity and resilience in Board level engagements in the private sector.

Prior to joining PA, on behalf of DCMS, the NCSC and cyber security professional bodies, I chaired the project to form the new UK Cyber Security Council.  I also formed and led a cross public and private sector Trailblazer group to form the new Level 3 Cyber Security Apprenticeship standard.

I was awarded a MBE for services to cyber security in the 2022 New Year’s Honours List.

Gordon Morrison

Senior Director for EMEA Government Affairs, Splunk

Gordon is Senior Director for EMEA Government Affairs for Splunk Inc and a company director of Splunk UK. He spent the early part of his career as a scientist at the Atomic Weapons Establishment and later as a project engineer in MOD Abbey Wood specialising in technical security solutions. He then held a number technical and senior management roles in the UK defence and secure government sectors. Most recently, he was a Director at the UK trade association for technology, techUK and spent two years with McAfee UK as Director of Government Relations. Gordon has been internationally published, most recently with the World Economic Forum, has given evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees and has spoken at major international events. Gordon is also currently Chair of the techUK Central Government Council, a member of the techUK Public Services Board and a member of the ADS Security Sector Board.

Jeremy Morgan

Cyber Security Consultant, BAE Systems 

Jeremy is a cyber security consultant for BAE Systems, within the Digital Intelligence business, providing consulting services to security-conscious clients since 2001 and for Detica/BAE Systems since 2005. Jeremy works with business leaders to understand their security challenges and scope the right services to solve their business problems. He leads the Cyber Risk Advisory capability, collaborating across BAE Systems to enhance skills, develop tooling and define leading practices. Jeremy’s industry focus is Critical National Infrastructure and Central Government Departments. He brings extensive HMG knowledge and experience working with NCSC through schemes including CLAS, CCP SIRA and CCP Security Architecture, and initiatives such as ACD, CiSP and CyBOK. He is an Assessor of candidate NCSC CCP Security Architects for both BCS and APMG and holds technical qualifications including CISSP. He works with ISC2 and CIISec and has been part of the techUK Cyber Security Management Committee since July 2022.

Julian Meyrick

Senior Partner & Vice President, IBM UK Ltd

Julian is the Managing Partner & Vice President for IBM Security’s worldwide Security Strategy Risk & Compliance practice. In his leadership role, Julian helps clients develop their security strategy in the context of the cyber business risk that they face; he has a particular focus on advising boards on the potential business impact of cybersecurity and on quantifying cybersecurity risk in financial terms.

Julian is passionate about attracting talent into the cybersecurity profession and is a member of the UK National Cyber Security Centre’s Industry Advisory Board for their CyberFirst programme. Julian is also a member of the FAIR Institute’s Industry Advisory Board.

Kate Wendelboe and Aurorah Cheney

Director, Strategy & Growth, BT Security

Kate Wendelboe is currently BT Security’s Strategy & Growth Director (alongside Aurorah), a trained executive coach and previously head of Strategy for a portfolio of BT’s smaller businesses. Prior to that, she was Director of BT Media & Broadcast after doing proposition development, business development, and strategy. Before joining BT, Kate was at Reuters working in marketing communications and then journalism. She was one of the team that started Reuters Insider, Reuters’ OTT platform for financial professionals. Kate left Reuters to study for an MBA at Cambridge’s Judge Business School where she specialised in Culture, Arts and Media Management. Kate is married with two sons and, after living in the States, Hong Kong and Switzerland, is now based in London. If she had unlimited free time she would be training for an Ironman Triathlon, learning to code and writing a best selling novel

Aurorah Cheney is currently BT Security’s Strategy & Growth Director (alongside Kate). Aurorah has held roles as a portfolio director and senior programme manager reporting at executive board level, with accountabilities for delivering large scale transformational change at a global scale, primarily within the US, UK and Europe. She’s worked across several sectors, with a wealth of experience in technology and business transformations. Her strengths lie in bridging the gap between strategy and delivery phases, focusing on turning strategic ambitions into a tangible outcomes. In 2019, Aurorah worked as Head of Security Propositions in BT Enterprise, where she was responsible for developing security propositions strategy, also delivering comprehensive security solutions into the UK Enterprise marketplace. Her ambition is to make security controls accessible to organisation’s of all sizes; from small and medium, up to major and corporate as they commence or refine their own digital transformations. She is a collaborative, servant leader with over 20 years of experience managing teams.

Katharina Sommer

Group Head of Strategy & Public Affairs, NCC Group

As Group Head of Strategy & Public Affairs for leading global cyber and software resilience provider NCC Group, I am responsible for our political engagement, government relations and lobbying work, shaping the current and future operating environment that enables our growth ambitions and makes the digital world safer and more secure. This involves educating policy-makers on cyber security and briefing colleagues on policy and regulatory developments; it means I am an interpreter and conduit between NCC Group’s technical experts and the political world.

Keith Driver

CTO Cyber, Raytheon UK

Keith joined Raytheon in 2015 and is an Engineering Fellow and CTO Cyber at Raytheon UK. He has a distinguished career in the telecommunications, defence and cyber security industries as a technology leader and board member in a variety of SME and large organisations, delivering technical advantage though strategy, product definition, and innovation.  He has worked extensively with commercial,  defence and government sector customers worldwide, and has spoken regularly at global conferences.

Mark Brown

Global Managing Director, Digital Trust Consulting, BRITISH STANDARDS INSTITUTION (BSI)

Mark Brown joined BSI on 1st February 2021 in the role of Global Managing Director of the Digital Trust Consulting business and brings over 30 years of expertise in cybersecurity, data privacy and business resilience. He has previously held global leadership roles across industry and professional services organizations, including tenures as Global CISO at SABMiller plc, and Global CIO/CTO at Spectris plc, as well as leadership roles as a Senior Partner at Wipro Ltd.  Mark was also a Partner at Ernst & Young (EY) LLP.

Mark Jackson

National Cybersecurity Advisor, Cisco

I am an experienced Information Security Professional with over twenty years’ experience in technical sales, security architecture, strategy, and consultancy. During this time, I have engaged across the UK Government, wider Public Sector marketplace and elements of the UK Critical National Infrastructure.

Paul Barker

Principal Cyber Security Consultant , Atos IT Services Limited

Paul has over 30 years’ experience working in the IT security industry, working for both public and private sector organisations delivering advice and guidance on enterprise security as well as delivering global security platforms.  Paul has been an advocate for the adoption of industry and regulatory standards encompassing security best practices and has extensive experience in the secure architecture design and deployment for telecommunications, petro-chemical, healthcare, governments, police forces and financial institutions across the globe. 

Richard Beck

Director of Cyber, QA

Richard is an experienced security professional, turned educator, with over 15 years in operational security roles. He is a positive change agent with an innovative, commercial, and collaborative approach.

Richard is driven to enable cyber security skills for now – and for the future – helping the UK to address the immediate and longer-term cyber skills shortages and bring a more diverse range of individuals and experiences into cyber through eco-system collaboration.

Richard has designed and architected numerous enterprise and nationwide cyber programmes, including the NCSC CyberFirst interventions, multiple funded technical boot camps, women in cyber programme, secure engineering, future security leader and the award winning NPCC national cybercrime programme.

Rick Hemsley

Partner, Cyber Security Consulting , EY

Rick is a Partner in the EY UKI Cyber Security practice and leads our Government and Infrastructure (G&I) security practice. Rick is an accomplished Executive, Partner Level Consultant and Information Technology Professional with over 25 years of experience. He has a proven track record delivering tangible positive results at a senior level, he has been involved in the execution and leadership of key cyber security initiative across sectors including within HMG. Rick led the consulting team that supported NHS Digital in the delivery of their Cyber Security Improvement programme (including: Strategy; Funding; Secure Boundary; Architecture; Threat Intelligence; SecOps Improvement) and led the consulting team that supported GSG in the development of the GSG operating model and security profession. Outside of public sector Rick has provided quality and assurance to major cyber programmes across sectors including highly regulated environments such as Financial Services.

Saba Ahmed

Managing Director – Accenture Security UKI, Accenture UK

I lead the Managed Security Services consulting practice for Accenture UK with a focus on Detection & Response. I have 19 years of experience in the security industry spanning across geographies delivering security projects in Middle East, Asia and Europe.

For the last 10 years my focus has been on building Security Operations Centres and SIEM transformations for UK clients. More recently I have also been working with technology vendors in this space to define what the next generation of security operations looks like.

Sarah Blundell

Chief Operating Officer, CyberHive

As COO of a growing UK Cyber SME, I am passionate about delivering technology that can be used to protect people while also delivering business value.  Much of the focus in Cyber security education is on improving the security baseline but I believe that this should not be at the expense of identifying and analysing new and emerging threats and trends along with the opportunities this can provide UK PLC.

My prior background in risk management in the financial services sector and strong operational delivery experiences enables me to blend the desire for increased security with the requirements for usability to ensure that security posture is increased both theoretically and in practice.

Shadi Razak

Co-founder and CTO, ANGOKA (& CyNation)

Shadi is a cyber security and business digitisation expert, with a strong foundation in business and IT strategy. His expertise in digital risks intelligence, supply chain cyber security, data privacy, cloud security, UAV & CAV cyber resilience has made him a sought-after advisor to and coach for a number of international blue chip companies, government organisations, financial services and SMEs in the UK and the MENA region for the past 20 years. Shadi is a successful tech entrepreneur, with a previous exit to Microsoft, and is currently the CTO of CyNation and Angoka. His innovative thinking has led to several security-based patents. He has been a visiting lecturer at a number of International and British universities and is currently a Board Member and President of the Information Security Group Alumni, Technology and Finance Society and a mentor for a number of FinTech and SecurityTech start-ups in UK, Netherlands and UAE.

Tim Ward

CEO & Co-founder, Think Cyber Security Ltd

Tim is CEO and Co-Founder (with Dr Mike Butler) of Think Cyber Security Ltd. ThinkCyber offer the next generation in Security Awareness. Their Redflags™ software product applies behavioural and learning science theory, in a highly innovative approach to deliver context-sensitive just-in-time guidance.

Tim has worked in IT for more than 25 years both in consulting and corporate IT with organisations including Logica, PA Consulting, Sepura and was previously Global Head of IT for the cyber division of BAE Systems (previously known as Detica). Tim graduated top of his year in Computer Science with AI at the University of Leeds, holds an MBA from the Open University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship from Cambridge University.

Tony Burton

Managing Director – Cyber Security & Trust, Thales UK Ltd

Tony Burton is the Managing Director of the Cyber Security and Trust business of Thales UK Ltd.  Covering a broad spectrum of market verticals from Defence, Government and CNI, Tony has established Thales as a leading supplier of cyber consultancy, managed services and programme delivery.  Tony’s commitment to the development of an inclusive and socially responsible business has seen great progress in STEM outreach and regional development in South Wales and the establishment of an international Operational Technology Cyber Competence Centre has been a particular highlight alongside the National Digital Exploitation Centre.   Tony comes from a strong engineering and business management background and has been an active member of the ADS Security Sector Board over the last seven years.  Tony is married with two children and is still a keen participant in a number of sports including football, running, surfing and cycling.