The information security industry is simultaneously robust and beset by problems and challenges. For one thing: attacks are proliferating and becoming more stealthy and difficult to detect. Updated virus signatures won’t do you much good these days, when attackers are infiltrating software build processes or “living off the land” using administrative tools like Powershell and WMI to do their dirty work.

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Renee Tarun is the Deputy CISO and Vice President for Information Security at Fortinet Inc.

Compounding that there is a talent shortage that measures in the millions of workers globally, and hundreds of thousands of workers just in the U.S. To continue to be effective, in other words, the information security industry needs both better tools to fight adversaries, and more people to do the fighting.

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Our guest this week has some ideas on how we might square that circle. To wrap up our coverage of women’s history month and as part of our on-going series on Women in Cyber, we sat down with Renee Tarun is the Deputy CISO and VP of Infosec at Fortinet and a veteran of both the NSA where she served as Special Assistant to the Director for Cybersecurity.

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In this interview, Renee talks about her journey to a leadership role in information security and about how the information security can scale up to meet the challenges of the future. That means both embracing technologies like automation and machine learning to help manage the tsunami of data and threats, and broadening the avenues into information security and attracting a range of skills – both hard and soft- to the industry. We also talk about her latest project: a children’s book to educate kids about basic cyber security concepts. 

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and check us out on SoundCloud, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted.