Speaker Spotlight: eSentire's Tia Hopkins on the Importance of Chief Cyber Resilience Officers, Emerging Tech, and Inclusion

For the last two decades, Tia Hopkins has focused on "keeping our families safe, protecting our critical infrastructure, ensuring businesses continue to safely innovate and produce for their customers, and protecting the supply chain," as she says. Next on the list: Tia was recognized by our sister brand, Dark Reading, after snagging the top placement on their list of '8 More Women in Security You May Not Know but Should' in 2022. She will be the keynote speaker for our Network Resilience Boot Camp. The event will take place on Thursday, June 29, co-presented by Network Computing and Data Center Knowledge.

Tia is the Chief Cyber Resilience Officer and Field CTO at eSentire, as well as an adjunct professor of Cybersecurity, a women's tackle football coach, contributing author, and a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. With just over 20 years of experience in the IT security industry, she was recognized by SC Media as an outstanding educator in 2019, as well as one of The Software Report's Top 25 Women Leaders in Cybersecurity and Cyber Defense Magazine's Top 100 Women in Cybersecurity; both in 2020. In 2021, Tia was recognized as a Top Influencer in the Security Executives category by IFSEC Global. She will be the keynote speaker for our early-afternoon session titled "Modern Infrastructure Requires New Network Resiliency Thinking." She provided us with some clarity in a video interview.

Emerging technology like 5G, automation, and AI will continue to address and enhance digital business. "So, you think about going from, like I said, being excited about being able to send a picture message to now leveraging 5G to stand up smart cities, the ever-expanding Internet of Things that's connecting to that – it's incredible, and it's a huge business enabler. Then you move to AI and automation, just taking away the repetitive, predictable, mundane tasks – putting that into a process that just runs and getting your human capital to focus on more important things."

When considering Tia’s upcoming keynote detailing why the modern infrastructure requires new network resiliency thinking, we wanted to know more about why It leads us to the differences between cyber and operational resilience. That contrast tends to center around aspects of cybersecurity such as threat management, incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery. "I mean, the possibilities are endless. I'm a big Marvel fan, and one of my favorite quotes is with great power comes great responsibility, so we do have to be aware right of the security implications that these things bring. So, with 5G bringing a wider attack surface that is managed by a mobile provider, you may have less visibility. How do you make sure that your data is protected in an area like that? Well, sure, we can leverage AI to enable our businesses and leverage automation to do things more efficiently, but so can attackers."