John Linford
Security Portfolio Forum Director
The Open Group
John Linford is the Forum Director of The Open Group Security Portfolio, which is comprised of the Security Forum, Open Trusted Technology Forum, and Assured Dependability Work Group. As staff at The Open Group, John supports the leaders and participants of Forums and Work Groups in utilizing the resources of The Open Group to facilitate collaboration and follow The Open Group Standards Process to publish their deliverables.
John serves on the Board of Directors for SiRA (Society of Information Risk Analysts) and has a bachelor's and a master's degree in economics from San Jose State University.
Mark Simos
Security Forum Chair & ZTA Working Group Co-Chair, Security Forum
Lead Cybersecurity Architect, Microsoft
Mark Simos is Lead Cybersecurity Architect for Microsoft where he leads the development of cybersecurity reference architectures, best practices, reference strategies, prescriptive roadmaps, and other guidance to help customers rapidly secure their organizations in the digital age.
Mark focuses on helping organizations meet both their cybersecurity and digital transformation goals by combining lessons learned from cybersecurity incident investigations and Microsoft’s experience operating and protecting hyper-scale cloud services.
Mark has presented numerous conferences including Black Hat USA, RSA Conference, Gartner Security & Risk Management, Microsoft BlueHat, Microsoft Ignite, and Financial Executives International. Mark leads the development of cybersecurity reference architectures, best practices, reference strategies, prescriptive roadmaps, and other guidance to help customers rapidly secure their organizations in the digital age.
Hasan Yasar
Security Forum Vice-Chair
Technical Director of Continuous Deployment of Capabilities, CMU SEI
Hasan Yasar is currently the Technical Director of the Continuous Deployment of Capabilities group within the SSD Division at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He leads a dedicated team of engineers to enable, accelerate, and assure transformation at the speed of relevance by leveraging DevSecOps, Agile, Lean AI/ML, and other emerging technologies to create a smart and secure software platform/pipeline.
Hasan continuously advises and supports various Department of Defense (DoD) programs in implementing DevSecOps with Zero Trust principles, contributing to numerous DoD working groups focused on DevSecOps, software modernization, Zero Trust, policy development, and advisory roles. With over 25 years of experience, Hasan has worked as a senior security engineer, software engineer, software architect, and manager in all phases of secure software development and information modeling processes.
Nikhil Kumar
ZTA Working Group Co-Chair, Architecture Forum
President, Applied Technology Solutions, Inc.
Nikhil is President and Founder of ApTSi (Applied Technology Solutions, Inc.) a visionary organization creating the future of technology solutions. Nikhil is an industry thought leader in SOA, Cloud Computing, Security, IOT, Precision Medicine, Healthcare and FinTech. At ApTSi, Nikhil defines corporate strategy, and business development, drives its SOASense™, SOAReality™, ZTaaS™ and ApMED™ product lines, and consults to key clients with extensive experence in the Healthcare, Insurance, Utlity, Finance and Manufacturing sectors.
Nikhil has been actively engaged in the setup and implementation of Enterprise Architecture practices, setting and guiding Digital Transformation programs, leading enterprise security initiatives (such as PCI Compliance) and the build out of Security Architectures. An Engineer and Computer Scientist with a passion for biology, Nikhil has pursued his passion with a lifetime of focus on Security, Information, and Computer Architecture. He is known for his ability of being able to communicate to the board and implement with the engineer and architect. An innovator and pioneer, he is a trusted advisor to the C-suite.
Nikhil has authored numerous books, standards and articles, and presented at numerous conferences and events, including The Open Group, ACM and other events. Some of Nikhil’s accomplishments include being a Trustee at the Henry Ford Health Systems Board, leading the architecture for Price Waterhouse’s Financial Planning Practice, chairing and authoring industry standards such as the SOA Reference Architecture Standard, being an invited MIT mentor for winning teams in Medical Hackathons and being the Co-Chair for the greater Boston AEA chapter. He has also written and authored numerous publications on Information Security, including on Zero Trust in the Utility Industry (Springer), on HIPAA and CFR 21 part 11(DIA), and on “Protection and Privacy of Information Assets in the Cloud”(Wiley).
John Feezell
SRM Working Group Co-Chair
Global CRQ Lead, Kyndryl
John Feezell, a recognized leader in the field of Cyber Risk Quantification, is the global CRQ lead for the Kyndryl Security and Resiliency Practice. John comes to Kyndryl with 20 years of security and systems expertise, tempered in the fires of IBM Services, as well as 4 years in the Insurance Industry with Blue Cross Blue Shield and Unum. John was a featured speaker at the ISC2 World Congress, lecturing on the Open Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) global standard and, most recently, collaborating with ISC2 in the assessment of proposed exam questions for the CISSP certification.
John is a frequent contributor to The Open Group Security Forum, most recently working to craft and test exam questions for the new Open FAIR 2 certification. Additional participation in The Open Group include whitepapers and lectures harmonizing Open FAIR utilization with both the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF) standards and Zero Trust (in process). As a passionate evangelist of the Open FAIR Body of Knowledge, John is leading the charge to launch Kyndryl service offerings related to CRQ and Third-Party Risk Management, as well as coaching many to achieve Open FAIR certification through mentoring and boot camps.