SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Data Storage Security Summit Speakers
2015 Data Storage Security Summit Speakers
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Wayne Adams, Chairman Emeritus, Member and Executive Committee Advisor Wayne M. Adams is a Senior Technologist and Director of Standards within the Office of the CTO at EMC and is responsible for expanding and managing EMC technology initiatives with the industry standards bodies. Wayne has proudly served on the SNIA Board of Directors since 2003 including roles as Treasurer in addition to Chairman during these terms. He has served in a number of leadership roles for conferences, forums and initiatives, and strategic alliances. Wayne also is a Board Member for the DMTF technology association and serves as the Senior VP of the Board. Within EMC, previous managing positions include partner management and software product management, where responsibilities included API licensing and product lifecycle management for Storage Resource Management, SAN Management, and I/O pathing product lines. Prior to EMC, Wayne was responsible for product marketing and business development of various strategic software and hardware products at Digital Equipment Corporation. He started his high-tech career at Eastman Kodak as a system designer of real-time control systems. Wayne holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh. |
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Justin Corlett, Business Development Manager, Cryptsoft Justin Corlett is a Business Development Manager for Cryptsoft Pty Ltd. A lawyer by training, he has spent the past fifteen years working in a variety of roles in and out of the IT sector, including a number of director-level roles. Excited by the growth opportunities in the IT security, enterprise key management and KMIP markets, he was persuaded to join the company early in 2015 soon after completing his MBA in Australia. Justin focuses on the USA and EMEA regions for Cryptsoft. |
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Jason Cox, Security Architect, Intel Jason Cox is the Lead Security Architect in Intel Corporation,s Nonvolatile Memory Solutions Group, and is Co-Chair of the Trusted Computing Group's Storage Work Group. He has spent the last 10 years developing storage security standards and architectures. |
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Tony Cox, Chair SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum, Chair OASIS KMIP Technical Committee Tony Cox is the Business Development, Strategy and Alliances Director at Cryptsoft with over a decade's experience in both the security and identity management fields. He has worked with both state and federal government departments on integration of security technology and public key infrastructure. He has experience in evaluation of multi-million dollar procurement contracts and in the establishment and operation of policy authorities for public key infrastructure for million-plus smartcard token rollouts. Tony is Chair of the SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum, Co-Chair of the OASIS KMIP Technical Committee and an active participant in the PKCS11 Technical Committees. He is also the Chair of the OASIS KMIP Interoperability Subcommittee, Interop Lead for the OASIS KMIP and PKCS11 RSA Conference showcase and has coordinated results gathering and presentation for multiple OASIS interoperability demonstrations as well as speaking on standards based encryption key management at various industry events. |
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Bob Guimarin is a seasoned business creation and alliance executive with extensive information technology, product engineering, operational management, and business development expertise. His global alliance and software development career includes IBM, Cisco Systems, and Motorola. Currently, Bob is CEO at Fornetix, a Northern Virginia-based advanced encryption management software company recognizing the expanding role of effective and usable encryption technology, required of any security conscious enterprise or solutions provider. He leads a strong cybersecurity development team focused on making the currently complex world of encryption easy, fun and safe for consumers of technology with a goal is to enhance the usability of encryption while maintaining the security that is offered by well implemented encryption technology. |
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Eric Hibbard, Chair SNIA Security Technical Working Group, CTO Security and Privacy HDS Eric Hibbard is the CTO Security and Privacy in Hitachi Data Systems where he is responsible for product security strategies. Mr. Hibbard is a senior security professional with 30+ years of experience in ICT, working for government, academia, and industry. |
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Radia Perlman is currently a Fellow at EMC. She has made many contributions to the fields of network routing and security protocols including robust and scalable network routing, spanning tree bridging, and distributed computation resilient to malicious participants. She wrote the textbook Interconnections, and cowrote the textbook Network Security. She holds over 100 issued patents. She has received numerous industry awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM's SIGCOMM and Usenix, election to National Academy of Engineering, induction into the Internet Hall of Fame, the first Anita Borg Woman of Vision award for innovation, and an honorary doctorate from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden). She has a PhD in computer science from MIT. |
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Liwei Ren, Scientific Adviser, Trend Micro Dr. Liwei Ren is a researcher in both data compression and data security. His research interests also include cyber security and practical algorithms. He is a senior researcher and domain architect responsible for advanced security solutions and data security at Trend Micro. Prior to Trend Micro, he was the chief scientist and co-founder of Provilla, a leading vendor of endpoint based DLP solution which was acquired by Trend Micro. Prior to Provilla, he worked at InnoPath Software as a principal researcher. Before InnoPath, he worked with several hi-tech companies as senior software engineer. Dr. Ren is a frequent speaker at industrial conferences and academic seminars. His moderate accomplishments include 10+ academic publications in mathematics, 20+ issued US patents, and founding a data security start up with successful exit. Dr. Ren received his Ph.D in mathematics and MS in information science from University of Pittsburgh. He also holds both MS and BS degrees in mathematics from Tsinghua University. |
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Thomas Rivera,Senior Technical Associate, Hitachi Data Systems Thomas Rivera has over 30 years of experience in the storage industry, specializing in file services and data protection technology, and is a Senior Technical Associate, with Hitachi Data Systems. Thomas is also an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), with a recent appointment to the (SNIA) Board of Directors, and is co-chair of the Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, as well as a member of the Security Technical Working Group, and the Analytics and Big Data Committee. |
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David Siles, Chief Technology Officer, DataGravity With more than 20 years in operations and leadership roles with growth companies, David serves as chief technology officer of DataGravity, responsible for leading the technical strategic vision for the company while guiding our product management teams and research and development efforts to better serve the needs of organizations looking for more from their data storage. Prior to becoming CTO, David served as vice president of worldwide field operations at DataGravity. Previously, David was a member of the senior leadership team at Veeam Software, a leading data protection software provider for virtualized and cloud environments. David also served as CTO and vp of professional services for systems integrator Hipskind TSG. He also served as CTO for Kane County, Ill., and has held technology leadership roles with various organizations. A graduate of DeVry University, he is a frequent speaker at top tier technology shows and is a recognized expert in virtualization. |
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Steven Teppler, CEO, TimeCertain Steven W. Teppler is an attorney, inventor, and the CEO of TimeCertain, LLC, an information security solutions company. He founded TimeCertain in 1999 after having confronted first-hand the evidentiary issues presented by challenge-prone digital data content. Mr. Teppler, a litigator who has practiced law since 1980, is admitted to the bars of New York, the District of Columbia and Florida. Mr. Teppler is a member of the Information Security Committee of the American Bar Association, a co-author of the ANSI X9F4 trusted timestamp guideline standards for the financial industry, a founding member of the Information Assurance Consortium, and a member of the Sedona Conference Workgroup 1. Mr. Teppler writes about and lectures to the legal, auditing and information security communities about evolving theories of computer generated information and evolving theories of liability, practice and evidence in an electronic data universe. He also advises private and public sector clients about risk, liability, and compliance issues unique to electronic data generation, alteration, transmission and archiving. Mr. Teppler is a member of the Florida Bar Professional Ethics Committee, and contributed to Advisory Opinion 06-02 (Metadata Mining). Mr. Teppler’s recent publications include: Spoliation in the Digital Universe; The SciTech Lawyer, American Bar Association, Fall 2007, Life After Sarbanes-Oxley – The Merger of Information Security and Accountability (co-author) 45 Jurimetrics J. 379 (2005); Digital Signatures Are Not Enough (co-author); Information Systems Security Association, January 2006; State of Connecticut v. Swinton: A Discussion of the Basics of Digital Evidence Admissibility (co-author), Georgia Bar Newsletter Technology Law Section, Spring 2005; The Digital Signature Paradox (co-author), IETF Information Workshop (The West Point Workshop) June 2005; Observations on Electronic Service of Process in the South Carolina Court System, efiling Report, June 2005. Mr. Teppler is also a contributing author to an upcoming American Bar Association book working titled “Foundations of Digital Evidence” (publication expected February 2008). Mr. Teppler received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science Summa Cum Laude from the City College of New York, Phi Beta Kappa, and received his Juris Doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. |
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Robert Thibadeau, Ph.D., Scientist and Entrepreneur, CMU, Bright Plaza Dr. Thibadeau is Chairman and CEO of Bright Plaza, Inc., which has been in the business of producing new and innovative web businesses since 1994. A current major focus of Bright Plaza is an open source project called the Drive Trust Alliance (www.drivetrust.com). He is also on the faculty in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and has taught computer security there since 1996. Prior to taking the helm at Bright Plaza Inc., he was Senior Vice President of Wave Systems, Inc., the largest supplier of software for TCG Opal drives in the market. Prior to that he was a Chief Technologist at Seagate Technology, LLC. There he pioneered a new form of hardware-based encryption, known commercially as self-encrypting drives. Dr. Thibadeau was also the Chair of the Storage Workgroup in the Trusted Computing Group, and a founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Thibadeau holds a several dozen patents and holds degrees from Emory University and the University of Virginia. He is also an active member of the American Bar Association’s eDiscovery and Digital Evidence Committee, and co-authored the Data Breach and Encryption Handbook. |
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Liz Townsend, Director of Business Development, Townsend Security Liz Townsend is Director of Business Development for Townsend Security and has taught encryption key management principles at IBM's COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition as well as spoken on cloud security at the NetDiligence Cyber Risk & Privacy Liability Forum. She has written seven eBooks on encryption and key management, and is the chief manager of the Developer Program at Townsend Security, a data security company with more than 20 years experience providing industry-standard encryption key management solutions to large and mid-sized enterprise customers across retail, financial, healthcare, and government industries. |
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Nathan Turajski, Senior Product Manager, HP Nathan Turajski is a Senior Product Manager for HP Data Security (Atalla), responsible for enterprise key management solutions that support HP storage and server products, and techology partner encryption applications based on interoperability standards. Prior to joining HP, Nathan’s background includes over 15 years launching Silicon Valley data security start-ups in product management and marketing roles including Securant Technologies (acquired by RSA Security), Postini (acquired by Google), and NextLabs. More recently, he has also lead security product lines at Trend Micro and Thales e-Security. |
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Suzanne Widup, Senior Analyst, Verizon Suzanne Widup is a member of the Verizon RISK Team, and a co-author of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. She spends quality time hunting for publicly disclosed data breaches for the VERIS Community Database. Suzanne has 20 years of IT experience, including unix system administration, information security engineering and digital forensics in large enterprise environments. She holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems and an M.S. in Information Assurance. Suzanne is the author of Computer Forensics and Digital Investigation with EnCase Forensic v.7 |
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Michael Willett, VP Marketing, Bright Plaza Dr. Michael Willett received a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Air Force Academy (Top Secret clearance) and a Masters and PhD in mathematics from NC State University. After a career as a university professor of mathematics and computer science, Dr. Willett joined IBM as a design architect, moving into IBM's Cryptography Competency Center. Later, Dr. Willett joined Fiderus, a security and privacy consulting practice, subsequently accepting a position with Wave Systems. Recently, Dr. Willett was a Senior Director at Seagate Research, focusing on security functionality on hard drives, including self-encryption, related standardization, product rollout, patent development, and partner liaison. Currently, Dr. Willett serves as a consultant on the marketing of storage-based security. Dr. Willett also chaired the OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model Technical Committee (PMRM TC), which has developed an operational reference model for implementing privacy requirements. Recently, Dr. Willett worked with Samsung as a storage security strategist, helping to define their self-encryption strategy across Samsung's portfolio of storage products. Currently, Dr. Willett is working with the Bright Plaza executive team to extend the Bright Plaza strong privacy and authentication capabilities. |
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James Yaple, Principal Consultant, Jackson-Hannah, LLC James Yaple is a principal consultant with Jackson-Hannah, LLC operating out of Austin, TX. Jackson-Hannah offers technology strategy, development of innovative solutions to healthcare problems and cost-effective program execution. Previously James was Vice President for Health Care Strategies at Merlin International Inc. He has over 25 years of experience with the federal government and the financial industry. He was previously Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Department of Veteran Affairs data center operations and a lead software (Java) specialist at American Express. |