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Brandon Evans

Brandon helps organizations secure their applications and other workloads in cloud environments, specializing in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. As an application developer for most of his professional career, he moved into security full-time largely because of his many formal trainings through SANS. He’s a contributor to the OWASP Serverless Top 10 Project and a co-leader for the Nashville OWASP chapter. Brandon is lead author for SEC510: Public Cloud Security: AWS, Azure, and GCP and a contributor for SEC540: Cloud Security and DevSecOps Automation, and host of Cloud Ace podcast, Season 1.

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Since he was introduced to an internet connection, Brandon has been a developer. He started his professional career with Smartvue Corporation, an Internet-of-Things video surveillance startup that has since been acquired by Johnson Controls. Prior to starting in security, Brandon became a Software Engineer at Asurion. After creating many web applications over the years, he eventually wanted to try something new. He was offered a spot in the Security Mavens program at Asurion, and jumped at the chance. This is where his formal journey with security began. After taking three SANS courses, Brandon knew that security was where he belonged, so quickly transferred to the internal product security team performing secure code reviews, conducting penetration tests, developing secure coding patterns, and evangelizing the importance of creating secure products. In January 2021, Brandon took the next step of his professional journey to lead Zoom's secure development training program, manage its implementation, and measure its outcomes, bringing it to the industry standard as assessed by the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). Since September 2022, Brandon has worked as an independent consultant, conducting penetration tests, performing secure code reviews, and assessing the overall security posture of each environment across multiple clouds. Most importantly, he provides comprehensive, practical, actionable, and easy to understand solutions to address his findings.

Brandon’s love of teaching and public speaking goes back to his college days, spending 3 years on the debate team and summer breaks teaching iD Tech Camps at Vanderbilt University. These experiences taught him a lot about communication, persuasion, and empathy, three pillars he carries with him to this day. Brandon prides himself in making his classes fun, engaging, and memorable with the sharing of personal experience, war stories, polling the audience, and telling relevant jokes.

As someone who has only recently made the switch into security full-time, Brandon understands that one of the biggest barriers between development and security is the conflicting cultures. Developers want to develop. Security wants to have 100% security. These two goals are mutually exclusive! Given his experience in both areas, Brandon has been able to support both types of professionals reach across the aisle to improve DevSecOps at their organization. He believes that in order to prescribe solutions to development teams, one must walk a mile in their shoes. Brandon is happy to walk side-by-side with you as you face these challenges head on, constantly reminding you that you're not alone. Secure development is hard!

Throughout his security journey, Brandon has earned five GIAC certifications - GPCS (#1), GCSA, GPEN, GSTRT, GWAPT, GSEC, and GSSP-JAVA. He earned the AWS Certified Security - Specialty certification and he holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Binghamton University, where in his senior year, Brandon won the “Best Use of the SendGrid API” at the HackBU Hackathon. Additionally, he has won four Security Innovation Capture the Flag events, also placing second at their CTF at DEF CON 27, and in 2017 Brandon won the Asurion Hackathon for making an Alexa skill for cellphone support. Brandon taught the first ever cohort at the Vanderbilt University Web Development Coding Bootcamp in 2019, he’s a contributor to the OWASP Serverless Top 10 Project, and a co-leader for the Nashville OWASP chapter. 

In his spare time, Brandon enjoys playing the drums, chess, classic video games, and golf.

Hear Brandon talk about multiple clouds requiring multiple solutions here:

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