CDSA

CPS@NAB: Strong Executive Support is Crucial to Successful Security Teams

Speaking April 17, during the session “Leading Security Teams with Strong Executive Support” at the 2023 edition of CDSA’s Content Protection Summit at NAB (CPS@NAB), James Dunkelberger, partner director of program management at Microsoft, explained the importance of executives supporting their companies’ security teams.

Leading areas such as security” within large companies can be very challenging, especially if the executive suite see security as more of a tactical cost rather than a strategic element and business builder.

During the session, Dunkelberger discussed strategies to engage executives and gain support from senior leadership around risk management strategies that stand to have a positive impact on a company’s growth in core products and services.

Noting that he’s known Dunkelberger for a long time, Richard Atkinson, Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA) president and chairman emeritus, said the Microsoft executive has always been given broader responsibility and seemed highly supported, getting what he needed and being “highly effective at managing up” but also “incredibly effective at managing down” and managing his team.

Atkinson always thought, “Here’s a guy [where] it’s obvious that he’s got something that’s working,” he recalled.

“Well, I know who’s going to write my eulogy,” Dunkelberger responded and then went on to explain the most important parts of a job you have. “First and foremost, you have to do something that (a)  you’re good at and (b) you love to do.” After all, he added: “If it’s not a job that I just get enamoured with and involved with and really love, then why bother?”

“Earlier in your career, what are the things that you wish someone would’ve said [if you had] gone to a conference like this and some other person that has been through all this and learned all these things, could’ve told you so that you didn’t have to learn [it] all largely yourself over a period of 30 years?” Atkinson asked Dunkelberger.

“Darn you for asking that question because ever since you asked me that question, I’ve been thinking about it and I literally have a 14-page Word doc of all the different directions I could have gone with this,” Dunkelberger responded.

He pointed out he’s worked at Microsoft for about 27 years and runs the company’s security infrastructure for “all of our products, hardware” and services, as well as the Windows update infrastructure. “We update 1.2 billion devices a month and no two are the same so it’s an extremely challenging thing to get that right,” he said.

Dunkelberger went on to note that, over the years, he’s had a good boss and also a boss who “drove me crazy” – a “storyteller” boss who “would always make everything kind of really big.” In stark contrast, Dunkelberger said he’s the opposite: a “data brass tacks” kind of person who never oversells anything and must be 100% “sure before I’m going to say something.

But Dunkelberger grew to realise why he liked his job so much and why it’s so important, explaining: “My team and all of my peers that I work with, we protect the lives and livelihoods of everybody we know and love.”

Many people around the world stand to be affected “If we don’t do a great job of making sure that we’re not shipping malware out to those 1.2 billion customers…. If we don’t do a good job of scanning 80 billion files before we send it out of Microsoft to make sure they don’t have viruses or malware, spyware or something like that in it, the consequences could be dramatic for all sorts of people,” he added.

To view the session, click here.

To view the Microsoft Security Copilot Video, click here.

The 2023 Content Protection Summit was presented by Fortinet and sponsored by Convergent, Signiant, Verimatrix, Eluvio, NAGRA, PDG Consulting and EIDR. The event was produced by MESA, in association with NAB and the CDSA.