Gabe Marzano

Head of Cybersecurity at Palo Alto Networks and one half of the team behind the Dark Mode podcast

Gabe Marzano is head of cybersecurity at Palo Alto Networks and one half of the team behind the Dark Mode podcast. It’s a role far from her youthful ambition. “When I left school I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” she says.

However, she did manage to fulfil that goal, playing until recently in Melbourne Victory’s women’s team. Along the journey to her current roles, which are two of many, she managed to fit in a significant stint in the military, where her interest in cybersecurity originated.

Marzano spent seven years in the Australian Army as a combat engineering officer where, she says, she “became incredibly curious about technology and its impact on humanity, so was inspired to transition into the corporate sector.” She also gained the distinction of being the first female combat diver in the Australian Defence Force.

Before joining Palo Alto Networks Marzano was business manager cybersecurity and, later, head of cybersecurity at NextGen Group, an IT value added services company founded in 2011 by Oracle when it asked then group CEO John Walters to set up a new Australian distributor. In this role, she says, she “built a $50m cybersecurity software business,” that “taught me commercialisation and corporate leadership.”

FOCUSSED AMBITION

With such an impressive list of achievements, it is perhaps not surprising Marzano cites the most important decision in her career journey as being “to be purposeful about who I want to become and what I want to achieve in my life.”

It is also hardly surprising she regards individualism as “the most important tenet for success.” Her advice to anyone aspiring to a role like hers is “Figure out what interests you the most and execute well to get there.”

The biggest influences on her highly focussed career journey have been “learning from other people and being curious about the future through various mediums and literature.”

Marzano confesses to reading an inordinate number of books and consuming lots of content around topics of interest. “As an interpersonal learner I then like to take what I’ve learnt and hear from other people’s perspectives, both in private and public forums,” she says.

Despite the success she has achieved, Marzano says “obstacles, challenges and failures” very much epitomise her career journey, adding, “I have experienced plenty of them!”

She singles out her combat diving experience in the Army as being “one of the most challenging and rewarding times” of her very full life, and confesses, “Making difficult decisions to keep moving and developing myself typically means saying goodbye to special relationships, teams and businesses, which is all part of the journey.”

PEOPLE PROBLEMS

Despite all these challenges she says “I would also say the BIGGEST [her emphasis] obstacles I face every day are people’s mindsets. … We are in this domain to better protect people and technology and malicious actors are moving fast and exploiting vulnerabilities. In Australia we need to champion an optimistic security conversation and be better at building skills and capabilities to safeguard our communities.”

Better we will certainly need to be. Marzano sees multiple cybersecurity challenges emerging. “The most important security developments include the use of automation/artificial technologies and the advancement in our thinking and understanding of cybersecurity,” she says.

“The biggest issues in the near term include geopolitical cyber conflict tensions in a multidomain theatre. The biggest changes impacting cybersecurity involve the acceleration of any advancing technology and how we better protect ourselves in these environments. From artificial general intelligence (AGI) to hyper automation and the rise of scientific advancements such a brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and bioengineering; these all impact cybersecurity in various ways.”

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