David Roy, CISSP

My path into cybersecurity started in the United States Air Force, where I served as a B-1B avionics systems specialist at Dyess Air Force Base, maintaining and troubleshooting radar, digital flight-control, and power-distribution systems in a disciplined, high-consequence environment. During that time I designed a radar antenna actuator diagnostic tool that was adopted into official maintenance procedures, cutting repair time, cost, and technician effort fleet-wide. That early lesson, that disciplined engineering work can quietly reshape an entire program, has stayed with me for more than three decades.

From there I spent nearly two decades at Sprint/Nextel, leading regional engineering teams of 30-plus employees and contractors responsible for wireless infrastructure, network performance, and high-availability operations across Texas, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast. I directed disaster recovery and continuity operations during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike, coordinating with public-safety organizations and emergency operations centers to restore critical communications, and later planned resilient wireless infrastructure for national events including the 1996 Olympic Games and Super Bowl XXXVI, work that earned a Department of Justice letter of appreciation for post-9/11 security communications support.

I also led a market-wide engineering optimization effort using statistical and AI-based tools that took performance from 25th to 1st nationally, with the practices we built later shared with other markets. It's the project I point to most often when clients ask what a data-driven, metrics-first approach to a technical program actually looks like in practice.

In 2019 I took on a public-service assignment as a Census Field Operations Supervisor, recruiting, training, and supervising more than 40 federal field personnel while enforcing strict standards for confidentiality and secure handling of personally identifiable information during a high-visibility, deadline-driven federal mission. Since moving fully into cybersecurity, I've built a career as an advisor rather than a single-employer specialist, working across Layer2 Communications, Kudelski Security, Connections Wizards, BlackSwan Cybersecurity, and now Optiv. Across those engagements I've helped enterprise, SLED, and federal clients build security strategy and architecture programs spanning Zero Trust, identity and access management, cloud and network security, OT/ICS and critical infrastructure protection, incident-response readiness, and vendor strategy, always translating technical risk into terms executives and boards can act on.

After several years at Optiv as a Client Security Advisor, helping large enterprise, multi-national organizations modernize their security programs end to end — building multi-year roadmaps, aligning emerging technology with real business risk, and partnering with executive leadership to prioritize investment where it matters most — I'm now bringing that same knowledge and experience to a broader clientele spanning SMB, public sector, FedRAMP, and enterprise organizations.