Pete has 32 years of IT and MSSP experience and has been a hands-on CISO for the last 20 years and recently joined Check Point as Global CISO of the Americas.  Pete’s experience and leadership was most recently at Cybraics Defense as CISO. This company is an advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Analytics formed as a DARPA funded project. Pete is the former CISO of Hertz Global, successfully protecting the brand in over 150 countries, 20,000 employees and 10,000 locations. Pete led Virtustream’s (now a Dell company) efforts as CISO to achieve FedRAMP and NIST 800-53 certification in record time and hosted dozens of US Federal Agencies on its most secure cloud design. Pete started the MSSP, security consulting, Pen/Vulnerability Testing Teams as VP of Security engineering at Terremark and successfully guided these services migration in the Verizon purchase. Pete has been a local S. Florida trailblazer for many years, starting a wireless ISP, a network engineering company and an award-winning CRM-telephony Integration Company.

Pete has a long history of support of the ISSA and its mission.  He was one of the original 4 board members that started the South Florida chapter and was President of the Group for 4 years and helped grow the chapter to hundreds of members.  He started the “Hack for the Flag and Chili Cookoff” and large yearly conferences that are still going strong.

Pete is a founder, leader and member of numerous security groups and is a Board Member and Board Advisor.  In 2017, Pete was honored to be selected as a “Top 100 Global Chief Security Officers.”   Pete’s cloud security deployments and designs have been rated by Garter as #1 and #2 in the world and he literally “wrote the book” on secure cloud reference designs as published in Intel Press: “Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View.”