Craig Peppard
VP & CISO
ivari
Craig Peppard is the VP & CISO for ivari, an organization who provides Canadian families with quality, affordable protection options and the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their protection needs.
Craig has experience across a wide variety of cybersecurity oriented functions, ranging from IT audit, cybersecurity advisory, governance, operations and engineering. In addition to his cybersecurity experience, he is well versed on the customer facing and internal operations side of financial services, having started his career as a bank teller and working his way into call center, front and back-office operations as well as employee facing technical support roles.
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Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
I'm forever thankful for student co-op and similar intake programs. I was fortunate enough to be selected for a co-op placement at a bank, and this placement paved the way for my career working in various roles in banking, call centre, back office, technology and operations and eventually several different security roles. Never a specialist, I was always the person that was called upon to tackle new and unusual problems.
After many years in banking, I moved into senior security roles in insurance, then into manufacturing and most recently back into insurance, in my current role, where I provide cybersecurity support and oversight ivari.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
Be a personal effectiveness facilitator, help people be their best selves.
With disruption being a key theme of the past year, where do you see your role as a CISO going in the next 1-2 years?
I expect to see development and implementation of more online solutions using DevSecOps delivery. This will increase the need for skilled application and cloud security practitioners. This means that I will need to support re-skilling of our security staff to support the business, while applying more automation to routine security operations activity.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the role as a CISO?
Take time to find the "why". Chances are the idea you have was raised before, but there was a barrier. If you find out why things are the way they are, you can look at removing those barriers. It's up to you to remove as many of those barriers as possible to enable your team to move the program forward.
Tell us a couple of fun facts about yourself.
- I am somewhat unconventional. My first job was selling ice cream novelties from a pedal powered ice cream cart by day, while my second was at a horse racing track, another unconventional job.
- Like only 8-9% percent of people, I am left handed.
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