Tribe of Hackers Security Leaders

3James Arlen

“Early in my career, I learned that sometimes the only way to manage your availability risk is to kick a hole in the wall.”

Twitter: @Myrcurial • Website: www.linkedin.com/in/jamesarlen

James Arlen leads Salesforce Heroku's production engineering team, which is focused on delivering integrity, availability, and maturity to Heroku's fleet operations. Over the past 25 years, James has been delivering information security solutions to Fortune 500, TSE 100, and major public-sector organizations.

James is best described as an InfoSec geek, hacker, social activist, author, speaker, and parent. His areas of interest include organizational change, social engineering, blinky lights, and shiny things.

James holds the CISSP, CISA, and CRISC security certifications.

Do you believe there is a massive shortage of career cybersecurity professionals?

Well…I'm on record as being one of the first people to actually study the problem, and yes, there is a massive shortage. In 2014, I grabbed some media attention for “The Billion Dollar Problem” in cybersecurity hiring. Violet Blue published an article in ZDNet right around the time of Blackhat USA 2014 titled “Cybersecurity hiring crisis: Rockstars, anger and the billion dollar problem” (www.zdnet.com/article/cybersecurity-hiring-crisis-rockstars-anger-and-the-billion-dollar-problem).

In 2015, my team (Lee Brotherston, Steve ...