Chris (Aquia CEO) & Bala (Ex-Atlassian CISO) on Cybersecurity Leadership

Bala Sathiamurthy is the former Chief Information Security Officer at Atlassian, where he led global cybersecurity strategy and built scalable security infrastructure for products like Jira and Confluence. Previously, he served as CISO and VP of Engineering at NerdWallet, overseeing security, infrastructure, and data engineering functions. With over 25 years of experience, Bala has held senior roles at companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Foursquare, and Jive Software, and currently serves as an advisor to several cybersecurity startups. He is widely respected for building strong security cultures, navigating incident response, and aligning engineering with enterprise-grade security at scale.Chris Hughes is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aquia, a cybersecurity and digital transformation consultancy serving federal and defense agencies. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Chris previously served as a Cyber Innovation Fellow at CISA (the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), where he focused on public-private efforts to secure the software supply chain. He is the author of Software Transparency and Effective Vulnerability Management, host of the Resilient Cyber podcast and Substack, and an adjunct cybersecurity professor. Chris has led security architecture, engineering, and governance efforts across government and private sectors, and actively advises security startups on modern DevSecOps practices and regulatory readiness.Topics: What Makes a World-Class CISOWhat Every VC and Founder Should Know About Security The Art of Scaling Engineering and Security Teams Together#StartupSecurity#SaaSLeadership#DevSecOps#CISOInsights#EnterpriseGrowth