James Davis

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT JAMES DAVIS

Cybersecurity shouldn’t just be about protecting your data - it should enhance your organisation’s strategy and give you an edge. We have to stop viewing people as our weakest link; they’re the key component in a total security culture. My role is to make sure cybersecurity is at the heart of Jisc’s culture and practices.I bring an empathic approach to my work and leadership; I try not just to understand the technology, but also the needs, skills and experiences of colleagues who interact with it. I also balance the need for radical organisational, process, and systems changes against the need to keep leaders and teams engaged with those changes. I’d like to think that I’m good at finding common ground and bringing people together to solve shared problems.I have a strong technical background, having spent a large part of my career involved in security incident response, systems and network administration, and software development. My approach to problem solving is methodical yet flexible, and I am a strong believer in making evidence-based security decisions. I have broad experience in incident response, vulnerability management and research, threat intelligence, and network security.I’m an expert in (and a sceptical advocate of) ISO 27001. Standards such as this provide a good starting point for management of security within an organisation, but they can never provide a complete solution to what is a very complex problem.Most recently, I am proudest of my work in chairing Jisc’s COVID-19 pandemic response task-force. With the support of a much larger team, we have supported and cared for our colleagues through an unprecedented disruptive event. Many of the security changes I’d driven forward prior to the pandemic played a key part in ensuring that we were already prepared to support flexible working.