Avatar

John N. Stewart

Senior Vice President

Chief Security & Trust Office

John N. Stewart formed and leads Cisco’s Security and Trust Organization, which underscores the company’s commitment to address two of the most critical and top-of-mind issues for boardrooms and world leaders alike. Under Stewart’s leadership, the organization’s core missions include protecting Cisco’s public- and private-sector customers, enabling and ensuring Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle and Trustworthy Systems efforts across the company’s portfolio, and leadership in data protection and privacy, trust and assurance, and cybersecurity efforts with governments globally.

Throughout his 25-year career, Stewart has led or participated in widely ranging security initiatives from IT design for elementary schools to national security programs. He is a Board Director for ReFirm Labs and SpyCloud, special advisor to the Board of Directors for Focal Point, RedSeal, and NSX, llc. (LSE: NSX) and is on the Syracuse University’s College of Engineering Dean’s Leadership Council. Stewart previously served on the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Cyber Security Review panel, the Cybersecurity Think Tank at the University of Maryland University College, and the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th United States Presidency. During his career, Stewart has served on the Board of Directors for Fixmo, Koolspan, the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), RiskSense, Shadow Networks, and Shape Security. He has been on advisory boards for Akonix Systems, Anomali, Area 1 Security, BlackStratus, Cloudshield Technologies, Finjan Holdings, Ingrian Networks, Nok Nok Labs, Riverhead Networks, and TripWire.

Stewart, a highly sought public and closed-door speaker who leads an organization that is well-recognized across the industry, keynoted RSA Conference USA 2018. In 2017, the International Business Awards (Stevie Awards) and the Golden Bridge Awards honored the Cisco Security and Trust Organization as IT Team of the Year and Management Team of the Year, respectively, with Stewart also winning a ‘Stevie’ as an Innovator of the Year in Computer Services and Software. Additionally, Stewart won the 2017 Ada Award for his vision of a Trust-Based Ecosystem of Technologies, Process and People. In the past three years, Stewart and his team have received numerous industry awards, including Info Security Products Guide Global Excellence Award for Security Organization of the Year (2016); as well as RSA’s Award for Excellence in Information Security (2015), the Global Golden Bridge Award for CISO of the Year (2014), and the CSO 40 Silver Award for Chief Security Officer of the Year (2014) for Stewart individually.

Stewart has a Master of Science degree in computer and information science from Syracuse University.

Articles

December 18, 2013

SECURITY

Features, Bugs, and Backdoors: The Differences, How Language Can Be (Mis)Used, And A Word Of Caution

Language is a powerful tool. With acronyms like ACL, IPS/IDS, and APT*, the security world has created its own language, acronyms, and catchphrases. In our industry, sometimes the meaning of more commonly used words can cause misunderstandings. For example, is a hacker a bad actor or a well-intentio…

December 3, 2013

SECURITY

Sourcefire in Our Data Center – The First Inline Production Deployment at Cisco

In October, we were delighted to announce the completion of our acquisition of Sourcefire. With Sourcefire on board, Cisco provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive advanced threat protection portfolios, as well as a broad set of enforcement and remediation options that are integrated, perva…

November 15, 2013

SECURITY

New Research Examines Impact of Cyber Insecurity on Country’s GDP Growth

I’ve been in Australia this week visiting customers, speaking at conferences, and meeting with peers and colleagues in the security space. With Australia poised to take the G20 leader’s chair in just over two weeks (December 1, to be specific), my visit here could not have been better timed. On this…

November 5, 2013

SECURITY

The Internet of Everything Including Security

It’s one thing to say that by 2020 the world will host 50 Billion Internet Protocol-connected devices. It’s even more amazing that the planet’s number of Internet-connected devices already exceeds the human population. So how do we secure tens of billions of devices when we know that the vast majori…

October 29, 2013

SECURITY

Trusting the Cloud

In the past couple of years, cloud-based solutions have gone from the status of a brave new technology to a mainstream vehicle for delivering storage, application, infrastructure and other services. From a security point of view, consuming cloud-based services usually involves delegating security fo…

October 16, 2013

SECURITY

Security Awareness and Trust

Now that we’re in the midst of October 2013’s Cyber Security Awareness Month, it’s a good time to think about the connections between security awareness and trust. This discussion centers on three questions: How do we trust our computers and devices? How do we trust our vendors? H…

October 10, 2013

SECURITY

Cyber Security Awareness Month 2013: Trust is the Topic

With October designated as Cyber Security Awareness Month, it got me thinking about the connections between awareness and trust. Cisco has made significant investments in what we call “Trustworthy Systems.” These products and services integrate security features, functions, and design practices from…

April 22, 2013

SECURITY

London Calling

The Infosec London Conference is coming up this week, running April 23-25 at the Earl’s Court Exhibition Center. Cisco will be there of course, in a booth showing the latest Cisco security innovations and presenting four papers on: • “Securely Accelerate Access to Data Center Applications” (Tuesday,…

April 18, 2013

SECURITY

Effective Global Threat Intelligence Doesn’t Just Happen

The concept of crowd sourcing cyber intelligence may sound like an unstructured process, but there’s more to it than that. First, you need to remember that all crowds consist of collections of individuals contributing to the community knowledge base. Second, someone has to take responsibility for ga…