Leadership & Executive Communication , Training & Security Leadership , Video

CyberEdBoard Profiles in Leadership: Martin Dinel

Martin Dinel fell in love with the province of Alberta as a summer university exchange student from his native Quebec over 35 years ago. He returned at age 23 and helped set up the network infrastructure for a major hospital and then led IT infrastructure operations for a leading oil company. Next, he worked as an consultant and an ethical hacker helping other organizations find vulnerabilities - a job that helped him build up "bit of a thick skin" when it comes to advocating for cybersecurity.

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"Many organizations, of course, will recognize that there's a threat, but they will minimize the potential impacts, especially when they look at the budget that they have to spend to actually fix their systems," said Dinel, CISO and assistant deputy minister of the Cybersecurity Division, Technology and Innovation at the Government of Alberta.

Serving in the public sector taught Dinel about the challenges of managing security with tight budgets. Like most government agencies, he said, Alberta has struggled to keep its legacy systems up to date. Some legacy systems have been in use since as far back as 1998.

"Hackers very much know the potential vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of these systems or the platforms that were used to develop them, so the systems are under attack," he said. "So, that's probably the biggest challenge that we have at this point in time, dealing with 30-year-old systems and keeping them up and running because they provide critical services to our citizens, while also modernizing the environment and replacing some of the old systems."

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, conducted as part of the CyberEdBoard's ongoing Profiles in Leadership series, Dinel also discussed:

• His efforts in creating Cyber Alberta, a community of nearly 600 cybersecurity organizations in the public and private sector to provide mutual support for threat intelligence and best practices, as well as emerging risks related to artificial intelligence and quantum computing;
• The importance of information sharing and helping other organizations learn valuable lessons from cyberattacks;
• The value of security leaders in seeing the big picture but also acting decisively in the face of a cyber incident.

Dinel, who joined the Government of Alberta as CISO in 2015, is defining the organization’s cybersecurity vision and strategy to counter cyber threats and ensure the protection of Alberta’s digital assets. He developed a cybersecurity center of excellence, ensuring that Albertans can benefit from a strong, safe and secure Alberta cyberspace. He is a member of the CyberEdBoard.

CyberEdBoard is ISMG's premier members-only community of senior-most executives and thought leaders in the fields of security, risk, privacy and IT. CyberEdBoard provides executives with a powerful, peer-driven collaborative ecosystem, private meetings and a library of resources to address complex challenges shared by thousands of CISOs and senior security leaders located in 65 different countries worldwide.

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