Cybersecurity Executive Roundtable: Mid-Year Review

Christina Shannon is an accomplished Chief Information Officer (CIO) in the CPG chemical manufacturing sector, with a career spanning over two decades. She started her career in a technical capacity, moving to cyber when hard tokens were the industry standard for multi factor authentication. Christina transitioned to security leadership roles in Fortune 100 companies to executive technology leadership positions in mid-to-large-sized, private equity-owned firms. Throughout her journey, Christina has served as a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) four times, gaining extensive experience in developing effective strategies to address enterprise cyber risk across various industries. As CIO at KIK Consumer Products, Christina focuses on leveraging technology to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and secure critical digital assets within the CPG chemical manufacturing industry. Christina's expertise includes developing and implementing cutting-edge cybersecurity measures, fostering digital transformation, and enhancing IT infrastructure to support business growth and sustainability.

With twenty+ years in cybersecurity, Allan Alford has served as CISO five times in five industries. He “grew up” in IT, but switched to Engineering and led the product security mission at a telecommunications manufacturer for ten years before becoming a CISO. His approach towards information security is informed by his product past, and he views business alignment and profitable outcomes as the biggest drives of his security programs. Allan gives back to the community via LinkedIn posts, articles for various magazines, and via The Cyber Ranch Podcast. Today Allan is CEO at Alford and Adams Consulting, a boutique strategic cybersecurity consulting and vCISO firm.

Gunnar Peterson is the CISO at Forter, a trust platform for digital commerce. Previously, he was chief security architect at Bank of America, a visiting scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, and a contributing analyst at Securosis. As a member of the IANS Faculty, he delivers deep domain-level expertise for in the areas of application security, identity access management and detection engineering.