Modern CISO Network: Board Book

Julie Chickillo is a cybersecurity leader with more than 20 years of experience aligning cybersecurity resiliency strategies and compliance requirements with business objectives. She excels at building out security teams and practices for mid- to late-stage startups and mid-cap multinational businesses and specializes in building out fully automated DevSecOps programs that support software engineering teams. Julie is currently the Head of Cybersecurity for Guild, a late-stage startup that helps employers provide their workforce with tuition-free education and career mobility. Julie oversaw the expansion of their Cybersecurity and Privacy team from one to more than 20 employees in a three-year high-growth phase. As a firm believer that cybersecurity and privacy practices must keep pace with advancements in cloud technology, she has actively embraced and championed emerging practices at Guild, recently focusing on Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), building a security data lake with security information and event management (SIEM) alternatives, and establishing a DataSecOps program. In her early days at the company, Julie implemented a fully automated DevSecOps practice and a compliance program that was SOC 2 audit-ready in under nine months. Julie is currently focused on moving the conversation beyond simply hardening Guild’s enterprise cybersecurity defenses to creating organizational resilience to ensure uninterrupted business operations during a cyberattack. Julie is an experienced presenter, podcast guest, and evangelist for new technology in the cybersecurity and privacy industries. Her awards include Lacework’s Secured by Women (2023), the Colorado Technology Association’s CISO of the year (2023), and Trace3’s Outlier Award Finalist (2022).

She also has several years of experience working with regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-53 (NIST 800-53), ISO 27001, state legislative audits, federal Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits, Publication 1075, and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).