Securing some of the world’s biggest games. Bringing AI into security defenses at a chipmaker. Running security operations at a global bank. Managing risk across a state government. Turning AI governance into day-to-day security work at a major sports league. These are the portfolios of the five deputy CISOs below. Two have led security functions as CISOs elsewhere, one has spent nearly two decades in military cyber operations, and each holds a remit that shapes how their organization is protected.
Heather Axworthy – Deputy CISO & VP, Technology and Security, National Hockey League
“The deputy seat does not come with a spotlight,” Heather Axworthy wrote after being named to the 2026 CISOs Connect DC100 list of top deputy CISOs. “It comes with emails at midnight, the slide decks nobody sees your name on, and the job of making someone else’s vision actually survive contact with reality.” She has been deputy CISO and VP of technology and security at the National Hockey League since March 2024, and has been described as leading cyber defense and AI governance across multiple continents. She has also written about what AI governance demands in practice: security teams need visibility across prompts, responses, and tool-use sessions rather than isolated log events, with implications for policy enforcement, security monitoring, data retention costs, and staffing. Her career spans more than two decades of hands-on security engineering, from intrusion detection at Verisign to roles at Palo Alto Networks and Rubrik and a stint as field CISO at Nutanix.
Julien Soriano – Deputy CISO & VP, NVIDIA
Julien Soriano has been a CISO twice. He led security at Box as global CISO for more than three years and served as SVP and CISO at MongoDB before joining NVIDIA as deputy CISO and vice president in November 2025. There, he oversees the adoption of AI-powered security defenses and leads the incorporation of security fundamentals at scale. In August 2026, he was part of a proposal for a framework for reporting incidents involving AI agents. Over more than 25 years, he has built programs in cybersecurity, infrastructure architecture, risk management, and privacy, including as chief security architect at eBay and in security leadership at Cisco and PwC. His writing on cybersecurity has appeared in the Financial Times and Nikkei, and he is a guest lecturer at Santa Clara University. He studied physics and quantum mechanics at the Université de Provence before earning a master’s in telecommunications.
Nick Adam – SVP, Deputy CISO & Head of Fusion and Security Operations, State Street
Nick Adam has spent 18 years in uniform as a Marine Corps officer, nine on active duty and nine in the reserves, leading joint interagency and international cyber operations with the NSA, the FBI, US Cyber Command, and the Cyber National Mission Force, including multiple overseas deployments. He now serves as CIO of the Marine Innovation Unit. In his civilian role, he has been SVP, deputy CISO, and head of fusion and security operations at State Street since November 2025, responsible for cyber operations, threat intelligence, security assurance, architecture, engineering, and insider threat. Before that, he spent ten years at JPMorgan Chase as a managing director and business information security officer for the consumer and commercial bank, covering cyber defense, security architecture, and controls across retail banking, mobile, card, travel, and co-brand businesses, along with six acquisitions. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy.
Aaron Zollman – VP & Deputy CISO, Gaming, Microsoft
Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush all fall within Aaron Zollman’s remit. As VP and deputy CISO for Microsoft Gaming since July 2025, he works across the company’s gaming studios and platforms to protect the global community of players. “Gamers are a culture of cultures,” he has written: the teams behind each game work differently and use different technology, so their security programs differ too, all while meeting Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative bar and keeping gaming “frictionless fun.” He also sits on Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Governance Council. Before Microsoft, he spent six years as CISO and VP of platform engineering at health-tech company Cedar, running security and platform engineering together. He co-founded fwd:cloudsec, the nonprofit cloud security conference series, which has grown into 350-person events across the US and EU.
Jennifer Fix – Deputy State CISO, North Carolina Department of Information Technology
Jennifer Fix’s path into security ran through quality assurance and business relationship management. Over more than two decades at RTI International, she led quality assurance and application support, managed its enterprise application platforms, and served as senior business relationship manager, including as IT’s representative on its COVID-19 response governance council. She then became director of security risk and compliance, leading an integrated risk management platform implementation, acting as domain lead for its Zero Trust maturity program, and directing security for an AWS implementation. In July 2025 she joined the North Carolina Department of Information Technology as deputy state CISO, leading security operations and risk management teams, managing enterprise security and risk programs, and representing the department in strategic initiatives across state agencies.
Five Portfolios, Five Paths
Soriano and Zollman have both led security functions as CISOs. Adam brings nearly two decades of military cyber operations, Fix a career built on quality and business partnership, and Axworthy years of hands-on engineering. Their portfolios range from games and AI to banking, state government, and sports, and each carries responsibility for a significant share of how their organization stays secure.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
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- More Than Security: The CISOs Whose Titles Include Privacy, Identity and Technology Risk
- When Customers Depend on You: The Security Leaders Protecting the Services Businesses Run On
- Running It and Securing It: The Cyber Leaders Who Own Both Infrastructure and Security
- Security in Motion: The European CISOs Helping Businesses Transform
- From Policy to Practice: Europe’s Cyber Leaders Securing AI Adoption
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.