The Azure Security Podcast Team


Michael Howard  

Michael Howard Diving Michael is a Principal Program Manager in the Azure Data Platform, he started at Microsoft in New Zealand in 1992, and has worked in the field of software security for over twenty five years. He is a founder and architect of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL).
eWeek magazine selected Howard as one of “The 100 Most Influential People in IT”, one of “The 25 Most Influential People at Microsoft” and one of “The 15 Most Influential People in Security.”
Michael was the application security lead for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil and worked on state election systems during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.
Michael has authored many software security-related books including:

                    


Sarah Young  

Sarah Young at her laptop, recording a podcast episode Sarah is a security architect based in Melbourne, Australia who has previously worked in New Zealand, US and Europe and has a wealth of experience in technology working across a range of industry sectors. With a background in network and infrastructure engineering, Sarah brings deep technical knowledge to her work. She also has a penchant for cloud native technologies.
Sarah is an experienced public speaker and has presented on a range of IT security and technology topics at industry events both nationally and internationally (BSides Las Vegas, The Diana Initiative, Kiwicon, PyCon AU, Container Camp AU/London, BSides Ottawa, BSides Perth, DevSecCon Boston, CHCon, KubeCon, BSides San Francisco). She is an active supporter of both local and international security and cloud native communities.




Gladys Rodriguez  

Headshot of Gladys Rodriguez Gladys Rodriguez has over 25 years in the Information Technology field. Gladys' early Information Technology career started as a programmer using languages like C++ and Pascal. While working for a communication company, Gladys taught a class about using Office and after a student came very happy to show what he was able to do with what he learned, Gladys knew she needed to continue helping people and organizations to use technology to accomplish awesome things. After several years as engineer and managing information technology teams, Gladys started a minority-owned company to support Legal and Government Organizations. After ten years owning and managing her company, she saw opportunities to move to Microsoft and focus on what she loved the most: helping customers to use technology to accomplish amazing things. Since then, at Microsoft, Gladys has helped architect, consult and support financial, health and government customers with their identity, configuration management, performance and security environments. In the last few years, her focus has been helping develop end-to-end security solutions that uses Zero Trust, modernize security operations centers and use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up time to acknowledge and remediate issues in the environments.

Mark Simos  

Headshot of Mark Simos Mark Simos is Lead Architect for the Microsoft Cybersecurity Solutions Group where he is part of a group of cybersecurity experts, former CISOs, and former regulators who provide advice and guidance on cybersecurity strategy and technology. Mark and his colleagues help organizations meet their cybersecurity and digital transformation goals by leveraging a deep pool of personal experience, lessons learned from cybersecurity incident investigations, and from Microsoft’s experience protecting and operating our hyper-scale cloud services.

Mark is a recognized expert in security with real-world experience delivering solutions to detect and mitigate cybersecurity threats. He has presented numerous conferences including Black Hat USA, RSA Conference, Gartner Security & Risk Management, Microsoft BlueHat, Microsoft Ignite, and Financial Executives International. Mark leads the development of cybersecurity reference architectures, best practices, reference strategies, prescriptive roadmaps, and other guidance to help customers rapidly secure their organizations in the digital age.