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Steve Faehl

Vice President & CTO at Microsoft US Public Sector

Steve Faehl

About Steve Faehl

Steve Faehl is Microsoft's Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for US Public Sector, where he leads the Office of the CTO in providing strategic technical leadership across federal civilian, national security, defense industrial base, and state, local, and education verticals. In this role, Steve connects customer mission needs with Microsoft's technology and platform strategy shaping how cloud, AI, data, and security technologies are applied to the real-world challenges facing government and public mission organizations.

Steve and his team serve as the strategic technical nucleus of Microsoft's US public sector business. Advising senior customer executives on complex architecture, risk, and transformation decisions; accelerating trusted adoption of Microsoft platforms through reusable reference architectures and strategic guidance; and channeling structured market feedback into engineering and product teams to ensure the platform evolves to meet public sector needs. His team of segment CTOs spanning Federal, DIB, and SLED ensures that mission requirements shape both near-term outcomes and long-term product direction. They engage directly with public sector customers enabling them to realize strategic advantage from secure, resilient, responsible, and rapid frontier AI adoption with a proven security-informed engineering approach based on Microsoft's platform and best practices.

With over 20 years of cybersecurity and technology leadership experience across the public sector, Steve brings rare depth at the intersection of mission outcomes, security, architecture, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation. He is a recognized leader in Zero Trust, AI adoption at scale, and AI-driven security, with more than a decade of security R&D experience that includes pioneering Microsoft's first generative AI tool for cyber investigations and sponsoring the first production environment to achieve DoD Zero Trust at target and advanced levels in partnership with the US Navy and DoD CIO. His prior work as Microsoft's US Government Security Leader helped establish new models for effective public-private cybersecurity partnership addressing nation state threats at speed and scale.

Steve and his team are committed to a single mission: helping public sector leaders modernize with confidence, strengthen cyber resilience, and unlock measurable mission value from the technologies that best serve the American public.

Speaker / Contributor: This individual participates in SANS events, presentations, written content, or other community resources as an external contributor. They are not a SANS employee, instructor, or affiliate.