Martin Kessler serves as Vice President, Deputy CISO and Head of Enterprise Cybersecurity Services at Verizon. In this role, he leads a world-class team responsible for delivering enterprise identity and access management services, enterprise security architecture services, security engineering services, and cyber data management and protection services, as well as the Verizon India cyber services team. Prior to this role, Martin served as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Verizon Business Group (VBG) and Corporate Functions. There, he was the group’s lead cybersecurity executive responsible for enabling the business and protecting VBG customers and the Verizon brand by identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating cybersecurity risks across VBG and Corporate business processes and systems.
Martin joined Verizon in April 2017 and has more than 20 years of global cyber and IT risk management consulting, auditing, and operations leadership experience across both the public and private sectors, including a Fortune 200 power company and critical infrastructure operator, a U.S. Government agency, and a Big 4 consulting firm. His speaking engagements and publications include a wide range of cybersecurity topics, including governance and risk, security by design, application security, ransomware resilience, incident response, cloud security, and electric grid security and resilience.
Martin is a graduate of the FBI CISO Academy and has several professional certifications, including the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Directorship Certification (NACD.DC), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), and Open FAIR Certification (Cyber Risk Quantification). Martin also served as the Energy Sector Chief (2014-2017) for InfraGard National Capital Region, a public-private partnership with the FBI dedicated to the protection of U.S. critical infrastructure.