Jon Winbow

Background

About Jon Winbow

I got into cybersecurity by a happy accident. Twenty years or so I was in an IT job, looking after email systems and I saw a job in an area called “IT Security” that looked interesting, so I thought “why not give it a go”. This was when security was mostly very clever people working in a dark room coding and working on system infrastructure. They were super bright but perhaps not the best “people” people in the world.I loved the technology part, but I quickly saw that there was more to it than coding. It’s a cliche now, but true, that cybersecurity is a people conundrum. By a puzzle, everyone is employed to do a job- a leader working on integration or a scientist working therapeutic medicine or a vaccine for the next pandemic – and their focus is not on cybersecurity and rightly so. But they need secure data and systems to do their job, and that balance to me is what my job is all about.My passion is communicating and relating to business so that people think, “oh, actually, there may be a different angle I need to be aware of”. I know I’m doing a good job if we can build in security without affecting the ways of working in the business and we don’t have to press the Incident Management and Response button.I still love the tech and the backend part, but now my role is focussed on how cybersecurity can protect, enhance and facilitate business strategy.