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James Tarala

Senior InstructorManaging Partner at Cyverity

Specialities

Cybersecurity Leadership

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James Tarala

About James Tarala

James Tarala is a Managing Partner at Cyverity and a Senior Instructor at the SANS Institute, where he leads instruction and authorship of high-impact leadership courses such as LDR519: Cybersecurity Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and LDR419: Performing a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment (retired). In his dual role as consultant and educator, he guides organizations and students alike through the challenges of risk, governance and compliance from boardroom to SOC.

James’s career began not in computers, but in education: with a Bachelor of Science in Linguistics and early work teaching in remote global locations, he developed a passion for translating complex ideas into accessible learning. He then turned his boyhood hobby of computers into a technology teaching career, eventually moving into enterprise IT, infrastructure architecture and security consultancy. Over several decades he has designed large-scale infrastructure, engineered security architectures and delivered independent assessments for major organizations—and those real-world consulting experiences directly shaped his SANS labs and scenarios. As the author of the course LDR419, he brings his field work into the classroom, so students conduct assessments, build threat models and brief executives in real time. With LDR519, he trains leaders to build governance and risk-management programs that span the enterprise—not just technology teams.

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