Enterprise Finalists

Colin Anderson is a business-focused CISO who treats security as a growth function and business enabler. He has led global security teams in SaaS, retail, manufacturing, and financial services industries for the past 18 years as a 3x CISO for large public companies. As SVP & CISO at Dayforce, Colin helps scale security to support business growth and protect customer trust. He is a talent multiplier, with nine former direct reports now serving as CISOs.

Under my leadership, we built a modern, scalable security program from the ground up and transformed cybersecurity into a business enabler. We established a dedicated Product Security organization, embedded secure-by-design practices into engineering, and operationalized core capabilities across detection and response, identity, cloud security, and risk management. Most importantly, security scaled with the business. Over five years, we supported growth from $800M to $2B in revenue and from 3,500 to over 7,000 customers without a single material business-impacting cybersecurity event. These accomplishments strengthened resilience, increased customer trust, and made security a strategic differentiator.

As a visionary CIO & CISO , I lead digital transformation and cybersecurity strategies that securely power business growth. Managing a $MM budget and a 250+ person global team, I specialize in building proactive, privacy-first ecosystems and pioneering the safe enterprise integration of Generative AI.By championing Zero Trust architectures, global GRC compliance, and servant leadership, I empower organizations to innovate fearlessly while ensuring operational resilience and robust risk mitigation.

Under my leadership, we transformed our security posture into a proactive, privacy-first ecosystem, establishing an enterprise benchmark for safely integrating Generative AI through Privacy by Design. Key achievements include:SOC Force Multiplier: Scaled security intelligence and automated threat analysis, significantly reducing MTTR and empowering our SOC analysts to focus on strategic initiatives over manual triage. AI-Specific Defenses: Finalized and deployed advanced mitigation protocols to combat emerging AI-driven threats. Global GRC Excellence: Fortified enterprise compliance operations, ensuring strict adherence to international regulatory frameworks across the globe, including ISO 27001, GDPR, TISAX, CRA and SOC2.

Ben McLaughlin is Global CISO at Proofpoint, where he leads global corporate and product security protecting 1.8 million customers, including 87 of the Fortune 100. A three-time CISO and former global manufacturing CIO, Ben has led cybersecurity, cloud, SaaS, semiconductor, AI governance, product security, and resilience transformations across global enterprises. He is a CISSP and CISM, BayAreaCISO Programs Co-Chair, Gartner C-Level Bay Area CISO Governing Body member, and 2025 and 2026 BayAreaCISO ORBIE Finalist.

At Proofpoint, Ben McLaughlin transformed cybersecurity from a fragmented function into a Board-governed enterprise capability protecting 1.8 million customers, including 87 of the Fortune 100. He built the company’s first enterprise cyber risk framework, rebuilt the global security operating model, established global operating capabilities, expanded ransomware protection, modernized customer assurance, advanced secure AI governance, and created a BISO program through which 150+ Security Leads were mentored across the business. His leadership repositioned cybersecurity as a business enabler, strengthening customer trust, executive confidence, resilience, and secure innovation at global scale.

Most companies treat security as a brake. Sunny Nain builds it as an accelerator. As CISO and VP of Cybersecurity, he safeguards 145M+ Credit Karma members. From Melbourne, Australia, to the SF Bay Area, his 23-year career, including leadership roles at Meta, has proven one thesis: trust is a product feature, and security done right lets the business move fast. He is a trusted board advisor, keynote speaker, and Leadership Excellence Award recipient.

When Credit Karma connected its 145M+ members with Intuit’s consumer ecosystem, the challenge was formidable - Unify identity across two massive platforms without adding friction or compromising trust. Sunny’s team became the enabler, building a seamless federated identity system that lets members file taxes on TurboTax with zero friction, directly powering engagement & revenue growth. His team also built the Secure Data Processing Environment, a clean-room platform that enables processing of highly sensitive data with no risk of exfiltration & now powers many Credit Karma products - Proof that trust is a product feature, and that security done right lets the business move fast.

Sandeep Poonen is CISO at Nutanix, where he leads global cybersecurity across a hybrid multicloud enterprise serving thousands of customers. His portfolio spans AI security, identity, data protection, zero trust, and governance, and he chairs Nutanix’s AI Governance Committee. Prior to Nutanix, he was Global CISO at First Advantage and Poppulo, and before that, Cloud CISO at VMware. He is a sought-after thought leader on securing enterprise AI and agentic systems.

When generative AI swept the enterprise, most security teams faced a choice between prohibition and paralysis. At Nutanix, we chose a third path. As CISO, I led the creation of a comprehensive AI governance program to establish enterprise policy, operating framework, risk assessment, and standards. It was not built alone, but in genuine partnership with Legal, Privacy, and Engineering. The result: Shadow AI gave way to governed AI, and clarity for adoption has accelerated. The program now anchors Nutanix’s broader AI security strategy, based on the philosophy that in the AI era, speed is a key part of security controls.