AWS Verified episode 3: In conversation with Noopur Davis from Comcast

2020 emphasized the value of staying connected with our customers. On that front, I’m proud to bring you the third episode of our new video series, AWS Verified. The series showcases conversations with security leaders discussing trends and lessons learned in cybersecurity, privacy, and the cloud. In episode three, I’m talking to Noopur Davis, Executive Vice President and Chief Product and Information Security Officer at Comcast. As you can imagine, she had a busy 2020, as Comcast owns and operates Comcast Business and Xfinity, among others. During our conversation, we spoke about Comcast’s commitment to proactive security, with leaders setting a high bar for technology and decision-making.

Additionally, Noopur shared her journey in becoming a security leader at Comcast, talking about career growth, creating a security culture, diversity and inclusion, and measuring impact. During our conversation, she also detailed the importance of embedding security into the development lifecycle: “At Comcast, we stood up a Cloud Center of Excellence that included network engineering, security engineering and cloud engineering as equal partners. We came together to ensure we had the governance, technology, implementation, and rollout set up. Through this collaboration, everything came together. Collaboration is how this happens—the security team has to be embedded with other key technology teams.”

Noopur also recognized the heroic efforts of Comcast’s team responsible for security and increasing network bandwidth to meet the new work-from-home realities introduced by the pandemic. These efforts included dramatically accelerating timelines to meet pace of demand. “The network has never been more important. People are now doing everything over the network. I’m so proud to say that all the investment over the years that Comcast made in the network has stood up to this new reality. We added 35 terabits per second of capacity to get ready for increased demand. Our frontline people that did this work during the pandemic are really the heroes of Comcast. We also had programs underway that were accelerated by months. We did things in weeks that weren’t planned to be done for months.”

Stay tuned for future episodes of AWS Verified here on the AWS Security Blog. You can watch more episodes, including an interview with Jason Chan, Vice President of Information Security at Netflix, and episode two, an interview with Emma Smith, Vodafone’s Global Cybersecurity Director, on the AWS Verified landing page. If you have an idea or a topic you’d like covered in this series, please drop us a comment below.

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