Speakers

André Mendes was appointed Chief Information Officer for the Department of Commerce in August of 2019.  There, he has overall responsibility and oversight of all technology systems at the United States Department  of Commerce (DOC) and its associated Bureaus (FY2020 Budget $3.8B).

Before, Mr. Mendes was responsible for all global technology platforms and systems for the International  Trade Administration (ITA), the DOC bureau that manages global trade issues for the United States of  America. There Mr. Mendes oversaw a rapid bureau-wide transformation effort making ITA the first Federal  Agency/Bureau to be 100% cloud based, radically changing several workflows, enabling a massive scale-up of  service provisioning quality, an unprecedented rise in employee morale and job satisfaction while also  lowering overall operating costs to less than 11% of ITA’s appropriation.

Prior to ITA, Mr. Mendes spent eight years at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in various executive  roles; including CEO, COO, CIO, CTO and CFO. During his time at USAGM, Mr. Mendes managed overall  Agency transformation generating over $360 million in savings from 2010 through 2018 through aggressive  global technology and facilities optimization with projected 10-year savings in excess of half a billion dollars  ($503M). In that timeframe, global weekly audiences grew 78% (165-278M), all while reducing technology  and front office staff by over 22%.

Mr. Mendes has also held CXO positions at Special Olympics International, PBS, Pluvita, MRL Pharmaceuticals,  USAssist and General Health Inc.

Sean Connelly Trusted Internet Connections Program Manager, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Sean Connelly serves as the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Program Manager at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this role, he leads the TIC Program Management Office, which is responsible for leading the Office of Management and Budget’s TIC initiative within CISA. The TIC initiative is the federal government’s strategy to securely protect government networks that connect to the Internet and cloud providers. CISA’s TIC Program Office works with a wide-spectrum of partners across government and industry and leads the way at enhancing network security across the federal enterprise horizon. Mr. Connelly joined DHS in 2013 and has served in a variety of roles, including the development of TIC 1, 2 and 3, along with the deployment of CISA’s sensor capabilities (operationally known as EINSTEIN 3A), and was part of the initial architectural team that stood-up the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program. Additionally, Mr. Connelly was a lead author on the ‘IT Modernization Report to the President’ in 2017, as well as a co-author of NIST’s Special Publicization towards ‘Zero Trust Architectures’ in 2019. Prior to joining the federal civilian service, Mr. Connelly worked as a consultant to the Department of State, where he led architectural initiatives within the department, including the adoption of TIC 1 and TIC 2, as well as the design of the State Department’s next-generation telecommunications platform, providing IT for a global workforce. Overall, Mr. Connelly has over 15 years of experience in the federal domain, and over 20 years of experience in the IT and cybersecurity domain. Mr. Connelly earned a MS in Information Technology Management from George Washington University, and holds two Cisco Certified Information Expert (CCIE) certifications. Mr. Connelly holds the first CCIE in Routing, and a second CCIE in Security.

Aaron Boyd is an award-winning journalist currently serving as senior editor for technology and events at Nextgov. He primarily covers federal government IT contracting and cybersecurity issues affecting both civilian and defense agencies. As a lifelong nerd and policy wonk, he feels right at home covering the intersection of technology and policy in the nation's capital. For more information, please click HERE. 

Allen McNaughton is the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering, Public Sector at Infoblox and leads the technical design and support for Federal, State/Local agencies and the Education vertical. He is also responsible for ensuring that Infoblox maintains the highest level of government certifications across product lines.  With over 20 years of experience in developing security solutions for Service Providers, Public Sector and Enterprise customers, Allen helps customers not only understand the technical, but also the business impacts of cyber-attacks and how to help mitigate those threats, specifically with a focus on DNS. 

Dennis Reilly has been a Vice President at Gigamon for over nine years, leading
the group to 43% compounded annual growth and a 58% market share in the
network visibility and analytics space. With over 30 years of technology and
business experience, Mr. Reilly is a strong advocate for the Federal, State and
local governments and educational institutions applying information technology to
strengthen security and improve innovation and productivity. He has supported
government agencies in Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program
initiatives and implementations for 7 years.

Prior to joining Gigamon, Dennis held sales leadership positions at companies
such as Oracle, Netscape, BEA, and Plumtree Software. Earlier in his career,
Mr. Reilly served as an officer in the U.S. Navy and earned his Bachelor’s degree
at the United States Naval Academy and has a Master’s degree in business from
Boston University.

Dennis resides in northern Virginia with his wife and has four adult children.

Lisa Lorenzin is the Senior Director of Transformation Strategy at Zscaler, specializing in secure application access and digital transformation. For more than 25 years, she has worked in a variety of network and information security roles and has contributed to open standards for endpoint integrity and network security from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Lisa’s current focus is on helping customers achieve their security goals and create a seamless user experience across cloud and mobile environments through the use of cloud-delivered zero trust access  solutions.

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