Meet Catalino Vega; Catalino (aka, Cat) joins us as a Security Analyst in our Security Team. Cat comes to us with 15 years of experience in information security with a degree in Management Information Systems and Computer Programming from Southwestern. He also holds a CISSP.
Since the beginning of his career, Cat fell in love with being able to communicate at a high level to senior leaders, and at a technical level for the more hands-on staff in order to help get control over an organization’s security posture. That is specifically what made him stick to this career path; being able to speak to all levels of the chain of command about his favorite topic, security.
He started his career in the USAF where he worked as a Security Engineer. Cat was promoted to Staff Sergeant 3 years later where his official title was Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge(NCOIC) of Network Operations. Cat left the service in 2013 and joined a healthcare organization where he launched the technology component of their surgical centers. He was responsible for building out every step of their IT infrastructure from servers to switches to network cables and even the TVs in the waiting rooms. Cat had an extra focus on IT compliance, so when he had the opportunity to join the consulting firm performing their HIPAA risk assessments, he took it. From there he ran assessments on the nation’s largest data centers and performed CISO functions for a diverse set of healthcare clients.
Cat’s next role was at PwC where he joined initially as an interface between a single line of business in the US, and the security team. He was basically in charge of the compliance for about 30+ applications. Once he got a handle over that portfolio of applications, Cat decided to extend their service offering to the other US lines of business and even further to include all the territories in the Americas region (North America, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean). He left PwC responsible for the compliance of over 5,000 applications across the western hemisphere!
At Kuma, Cat will be responsible for running specific client engagements in a CISO capacity, managing our vendor relationships, and helping organizations mature their application security programs at a technical level.