Profile
Jonathan Flack is a seasoned security and infrastructure engineer with over 30 years of experience in large-scale distributed and hybrid cloud computing environments. He currently leads the contract team developing the architecture of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Worldwide Research Collaboration Platform, a cutting-edge system operating at scale within Google Cloud.
Jonathan is recognized as a pioneer in Zero Trust security and an early adopter of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. He champions stateful, code-defined deployments and emphasizes the importance of close collaboration between cloud engineering and security operations teams. This approach fosters a shared responsibility model that ensures both robust security and efficient engineering, resulting in agile, analyzable Zero Trust infrastructure with continuous verification and exceptional security and observability.
Beyond his work with AFRL, Jonathan actively contributes to the Cloud Security Alliance's Expert Working Groups on Zero Trust, Identity and Access Management, and Cloud Security Services. He represents the Department of Defense on the Joint Agency Industry Zero Trust Interoperability Working Group and collaborates with the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office.
His expertise extends to intellectual property, where he is a co-author on patents for encrypting network traffic at the IP layer using a "shim" process that sits between the network driver and the IP stack, allowing for encryption without requiring modifications to existing applications or the operating system kernel. He is also a published author on topics including Zero Trust, IAM, and Machine Identity. In his spare time, he enjoys the challenges and rewards of ocean sailing.
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