Alan Paller

Background

About Alan Paller

After building one of the first computer software companies and listing it on the NASDAQ, I focused on the more challenge task of building great cyber security professionals. First task was to find the very best practitioner teachers in the country and give them a platform to share the techniques they had discovered and the context and nuances that made those techniques effective. They gave their students the confidence to go back and implement what they learned. That is the essence of SANS - an ongoing competition to be chosen as the best teacher-practitioner in each area of cyber security. Then because employers didn't believe someone could learn that much, that fast, I built the Global Information Assurance Certification so that students could prove to their employers they actually had learned how to do the security job well enough to be trusted. As the field grew rapidly to hundreds of thousands of cyber security professionals, I saw the need to develop technical managers to guide teams of security professionals effectively and that led to the creation of the SANS Technology Institute or sans.edu, a graduate and undergraduate college accredited by the same people who accredit Princeton and Carnegie Mellon University. While all this was happening the cyber security field changed from protecting the perimeter to finding and excising intruders, and it became clear that most organizations did not have the onboard talent to even find the intruders quickly. So in 2021 I helped launch the National Cyber Scholarship Foundation to identify and support students who can become those hunters.