John Linford
Forum Director, The Open Group
Security Forum & Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF)
John Linford is the Forum Director of The Open Group Security Forum and Open Trusted Technology Forum. As staff at The Open Group, John supports the leaders and participants of the Security Forum in utilizing the resources of The Open Group to facilitate collaboration and follow The Open Group Standards process to publish their deliverables.
John has a bachelor's and a master's degree in economics from San Jose State University.
Mike Jerbic
Security Forum Chair & SRM Working Group Chair
Trusted Systems Consulting
Mike Jerbic grew up and has worked his entire career in Silicon Valley, CA, where he now heads up his own information risk management consulting practice Trusted Systems Consulting Group and is current Chair of the Open Group Security Forum, the interest group that sustains the Open FAIRTM Industry Standard quantitative risk analysis body of knowledge. Prior to that, he has had thirty-five years of extensive experience including developing and managing high technology products at Hewlett Packard, managing information security IT projects at Visa, teaching college economics courses at San Jose State University, and leading risk analyses at clients such as the City and County of San Francisco.
Mike’s areas of research interest center on problems that intersect technology, law, and markets, and believes that cybersecurity problems we face now require critical thinking across multiple technical, social, and legal disciplines. He’s a published author, having contributed to three American Bar Association published works and has presented across the country on economics, technology, and security.
Mike has a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in economics from San Jose State University.
Mike Leuzinger
Security Forum Vice-Chair
Chief Architect of Information Risk Management, Nationwide Insurance
Mike Leuzinger, Chief Architect of Information Risk Management at Nationwide Insurance, is a persistently curious IT and business leader with 25 years focused on the cross-roads of technology architecture, delivery, and operations. Through his work at LEXIS-NEXIS, Microsoft, and Nationwide Insurance, Mike has led organizational and technology transformations related to cybersecurity, network services, data platforms, web services, and operational efficiency. Providing security guidance since contributing to Microsoft’s “Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures” in 2003, Mike has focused on sharing key insights to a broad community, while staying grounded as a day-to-day practitioner through his career as a Consulting Architect, Account Manager, Product Owner, and Chief Security Architect for Fortune 100 companies.
Altaz Valani
Security & Risk Management Working Group Co-Chair
Director of Insights Research at Security Compass
Altaz Valani is the Director of Insights Research at Security Compass where he specializes in software security, threat modeling, and DevSecOps. Altaz is currently Vice Chair of The Open Group Security Forum, a Board member at OASIS, and on the SAFECode Technical Leadership Council. He participates in various industry and standards communities like IEEE, Cloud Security Alliance, and Object Management Group.
Altaz firmly believes that the Security and Risk Management Working Group is doing vital work in the broader industry context of making security operational, and he would be honored to serve in a leadership capacity to further these efforts, acting as Co-Chair for the remainder of the July 2021 – August 2023 term.
Mark Simos
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.
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).
