Cisco names Sean Duca as its new CISO for APJC region

IT networking company Cisco has appointed Sean Duca as its new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Practice leader for the Asia Pacific, Japan and China (APJC) region.

With more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity and leadership, Duca will lead cybersecurity initiatives for the customer experience (CX) team for APJC at Cisco, the company said in a statement.

In a LinkedIn post on the appointment, he wrote, “After an amazing 6-month break to recharge and focus on my health, I’m thrilled to embark on a new and exciting challenge at Cisco, working in the CX-Team for APJC, and will eventually be based in Singapore. Day 1 is done, and loving it! I am excited to work with Jacqueline Guichelaar and the wider CX team and to reconnect and work alongside Peter M.”

Before this, Duca worked at cyber security firm Palo Alto Networks for nearly nine years as vice president and regional CSO for the APJ region, where he worked on the development of thought leadership, threat intelligence and security best practices for the cyber security community and business executives at the company.

Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, he spent 15 years in a variety of roles at Intel Security (McAfee), with his last position as the Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific. He was responsible for improving and driving the company’s solution strategy and technology vision and steered the development of Intel Security’s reference architectures in close collaboration with customers and partners across the region.

Duca also held managerial roles at the company with a focus on technology management and sales engineering. Before Intel Security, he was involved in software development, technical support and consulting services for a range of Internet security solutions.

Besides, with his extensive experience in the IT and security industry, he acts as a trusted advisor to organisations across the region helping them improve their security postures and align security strategically with business initiatives.

At Cisco, where he sees an excellent growth potential for innovative and secured solutions, he is looking to reconnect with partners, and customers to help them achieve their security and business goals, proving value and extracting value from their Cisco investment.

Duca was particularly excited with Cisco Hypershield, a software-based technology it launched in April that protects applications, devices, and data across public and private data centres, clouds, and physical locations.

Cisco announced its push around AI and security at the recently concluded Cisco Live! conference being held in Las Vegas earlier in June. The company also unveiled several security updates, including integrating its Splunk acquisition with Cisco security, a new firewall series, and new AI-native management for its Cisco Security Cloud.

Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager for security and collaboration at Cisco, told conference attendees that the Cisco approach to cybersecurity is built on a foundation of physical and virtual firewalls that can be extended across a highly distributed computing environment. Cisco is trying to bring security to the workload rather than moving the workload to security, he said.