Eric Hussey
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Finastra
Eric Hussey is Finastra’s recently appointed Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer. Appointed in October 2023, Eric’s responsibilities encompass enterprise, product security, engineering and architecture.
After all, Finastra is a digital company, its products are digital in their very nature. This means that not only does Eric’s work help secure security needs for Finastra, but cybersecurity solutions are also significant components of the products and services Finastra offers.
In addition to internal and customer-facing cybersecurity responsibilities, Eric is charged with overseeing ID verification and access management.
“Cyber defence is our eyes in the sky, if you like, scanning and protecting us,” Eric says. “We partner with companies like BlueVoyant to help us do that, to power our security operations. Then, we have separate teams responsible for vulnerability management practices. All of this sits under one integrated approach, which is the cyber defence team here at Finastra.”
The evolving importance of cyber defence
Arguably, cybersecurity is more important today than ever before. Nobody knows this more than Finastra’s CISO, who rightly says “things are much different” from when he first started out in the cybersecurity space.
In fact, at the time Eric joined the working world couldn’t have been worse for a burgeoning technologist – graduating from University during the 2008 financial crisis and dot-com bust.
Nonetheless, he managed to secure a six-month contract position with Fiserv, where he leveraged his software development experience to understand the software company’s systems quickly. His success here saw him take up a full-time position with Fiserv’s cybersecurity team.
“This was back in 2001,” says Eric, “a time when security – from today’s perspective – would be considered very legacy. Back then you had your mainframe, mainframe security team and network security team – there wasn’t a lot of software security in the middle of that.
“I’ve been in cybersecurity for almost 25 years now, and I’ve been able to grow and evolve alongside the technology in those years. It’s been a very rewarding career,” says Eric.
Today, Eric’s position in cybersecurity is more than just a job. He sits on the Executive Cybersecurity Exchange, which drives industry collaboration and is a member of Cyversity (once known as ICMCP).
This gives Eric the chance to mentor underrepresented minorities in cyber and information security. “I was given a shot to work in the cybersecurity space, now it’s about giving back and helping others on their career path in the space,” Eric notes.
Now at Finastra, Eric calls himself “a puzzler and a builder”. Indeed, the cybersecurity space is filled with challenges, and it isn’t enough today to just be technically competent, you need to solve complex issues on a daily basis.
“I see these challenges as opportunities,” Eric adds, “not every set of circumstances is the same, so every time there’s a challenge, it represents an opportunity to prove your worth and solve the present problems, which I love to do.”
Read the full story HERE.
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