Austin’s security bench reflects a city that grew into a technology capital without giving up its institutional core. The seven leaders below secure a Fortune 50 hardware manufacturer, a public university, a county government, a defence startup, a dating platform, a banking software company, and a public ecommerce firm. Several came from vulnerability research and threat intelligence before crossing to the practitioner seat, and two spent their formative years inside federal and military cyber operations.
Kevin Cross – SVP and CISO, Dell Technologies
Kevin Cross has been CISO of Dell Technologies since 2020, elevated to SVP in April 2021, having joined the company in 2018 as Vice President of Cyber Security. He came from Sony, where he spent six years rebuilding the security function after the company’s most difficult period, progressing from senior manager of security engineering through director of the security operations centre and senior director of the global security incident response team to Vice President of Cyber Defense and then Deputy CISO. Before industry he spent years in federal cyber operations: Division Chief for Global Computer Network Defense at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and before that Division Chief of the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team with the US Army. He sits on the cyber and analytics board of advisors at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Cam Beasley – CISO, University of Texas at Austin
Cam Beasley has held the CISO seat at UT Austin for more than twenty-one years, and has been at the university for thirty. He leads security strategy for an institution with a $5 billion annual operating budget, protecting research environments, academic infrastructure, and public-facing services. His most consequential work extends well beyond campus: he founded and directs the UT Regional Security Operations Center, which delivers monitoring, incident response, and advisory services to more than 3,200 Texas public sector entities including school districts, municipalities, counties, water authorities, and hospital districts. The RSOC runs as a live production environment and a student training programme at once, mentoring more than a hundred students a year into public sector security roles. He has co-created and commercialised security tools, directs criminal and civil forensic investigations, serves as the campus AI risk officer, and taught offensive security as adjunct faculty in the computer science department.
Dan Holden – CISO, Commerce
Dan Holden spent two decades on the vendor side before taking the practitioner chair, and he is direct about why that matters. He ran the Zero Day Initiative at HP TippingPoint, the bug bounty programme that helped shape the vulnerability disclosure norms the industry now takes for granted, and directed DVLabs through HP’s acquisition. At Arbor Networks he led the security engineering and response team and the joint Arbor-Google project behind the Digital Attack Map. Earlier he spent eight years at Internet Security Systems and then IBM X-Force as an engineer and product manager. He crossed over in 2019 as BISO for The Home Depot’s digital channels, covering more than $10 billion in annual sales, and has been CISO of Commerce, the public ecommerce company behind BigCommerce, since February 2021, building most of the security and privacy programme from a clean sheet. He is NACD-certified and SEC materiality certified, and speaks regularly at RSA and Defcon.
Beth Anne Bygum – SVP and CISO, Q2
Beth Anne Bygum became SVP and CISO of Q2, the digital banking software company, in August 2023. She arrived from Acxiom, where she spent four years as SVP and Chief Security and Compliance Officer, and before that held senior information security roles at McKesson and a decade at Amgen leading governance, risk, and compliance, building the information risk management framework and running third-party and supplier risk assessment. Her remit has consistently spanned more than security alone, covering risk management, information governance, IT compliance, and IT training. She chairs the strategic board committee of the National Technology Security Coalition, advises the Forge Institute, and teaches as adjunct faculty at both National University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she supports a programme bringing high school teachers through graduate cybersecurity coursework. She is a vocal advocate for returnship programmes, having benefited from one herself.
Tony Hagale – CISO and VP of Engineering, Bumble
Tony Hagale is an engineering leader who took on security, not the other way round. He joined Bumble as VP of Engineering in June 2025 covering trust and safety and customer experience, became acting CISO in January 2026, and took the role permanently in May, now responsible for trust and safety, customer experience, policy, security, IT, and GRC. His preparation was ten years at Amazon, the last six as a senior manager at Annapurna Labs, where he built AWS’s custom machine learning accelerated servers from inception, delivering the Inf1, Inf2, Trn1, and Trn2 EC2 instances and the engineering organisation behind them across multiple countries. Before that he led supply chain optimisation teams supporting more than ten countries and multi-billion-dollar transportation spend. Earlier he was director of engineering at Innography and spent five years at IBM in solution architecture and the WebSphere development lab.
Eric Murphy – CISO, Saronic Technologies
Eric Murphy became CISO of Saronic Technologies, the autonomous maritime defence company, in July 2025. He arrived from Workrise, where he served four years as CISO, and before that was VP of Security Research at SpyCloud, responsible for strategy and research, building methods to pervade criminal communities and markets and developing relationships with law enforcement, regulators, and cryptocurrency exchanges. He was Director of Security at Squarespace, where he created teams spanning application security, threat intelligence, incident response, GRC, and security engineering, and founded a cross-company colloquium focused on intelligence practice and data at scale. At WP Engine he built the security function that carried the company to IPO readiness across SOX, SOC 2, and PCI. He has advised the Austin cybersecurity accelerator Manifest for a decade.
Brandon Rogers – CISO and Director of Risk Management, Travis County
Brandon Rogers has led information security for Travis County since April 2019 and added responsibility for risk management in May 2023, giving him both halves of the county’s exposure picture. He came to the role from the Texas General Land Office, where he spent nearly eight years as Information Security Officer, and began his career as a LAN technician for Lubbock County. Nearly two decades inside Texas public institutions is an uncommon profile in a city where most security careers pass through venture-backed software, and it is the kind of continuity that county government, with its court records, elections infrastructure, and resident data, tends to need.
What This Group Says About Austin
Austin’s security leadership has two distinct origins and they rarely mix elsewhere. One is research: Holden and Murphy both spent years in vulnerability research and threat intelligence before running programmes, and it shows in how they talk about the gap between what security tools promise and what they do in production. The other is institutional: Beasley has been at one university for thirty years, Rogers has spent nearly twenty in Texas government. What connects them is that the institutional half is not merely defensive. The RSOC that Beasley built protects 3,200 public entities and trains the people who will run them next. In a city that exports technology talent, that is a quietly significant piece of infrastructure.
Discover more cybersecurity leaders:
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- CISOs to Watch in Atlanta: From City Hall to the Credit Bureau
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.