Michael Wareman

My Skills

• Risk Assessment and Mitigation
• Leadership
• Security Architecture
• Regulator Compliance
• Team building and mentoring
• Data Governance
• Business Contingency Planning
• Vulnerability Management
• Automation and AI
• Incident Response and recovery

Work History

(click each for detail)

• Infosec Solutions LLC - Founder and CISO
• May 2024 - Present (Greater Chicago Area)
• Providing governance oversight, policy review vCISO and CISO advisory services for the Insurance, Healthcare and Financial Services industries.
• Technical expertise in N8N, MSSQL, Kubernetes, Microsoft Defender, Apache, AI, Intune, Office M365 E5 suite, Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel, Active Directory, Group Policy, Grafana, Containers


• StoneX Group - Deputy-CISO
• July 2020 - June 2024 (Chicago - Fortune 100 Financial Services)
• Direct cybersecurity department, overseeing operations, engineering, architecture, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management teams and supervising identity and GRC staff. Maintain in-depth knowledge of regulatory requirements and security frameworks relevant to StoneX business units. Develop strategic plans and optimize financial resources to achieve annual departmental budget goals. Collaborate with leaders from various technical teams to ensure timely delivery of critical security initiatives. Facilitate communication and collaboration among various departments. Manage coordination between legal and technical teams for litigation matters. Ensure that secure design and operational procedures are maintained for multiple high traffic SaaS trading platforms, including forex.com. Responsible and accountable for crisis management, business continuity planning and ransomware preparedness.
• Increased NIST CSF maturity score from 1.7 to 3.0.
• Lead the growth and development of multiple large international security teams, focusing on successful recruitment, mentorship, career development and coordination between teams.
• Pivoted the department from ‘firefighting’ to a structured risk-based approach: initiated a risk register, built a department roadmap, and implemented automation resulting in elimination of ticket backlog and a 50% reduction in mean time to respond.
• Developed enhanced communication strategies to improve coordination across multiple disciplines, ensure on-time delivery of important security initiatives and enhance understanding of risk tolerance across leadership.
• Reduced cyber-insurance premiums by 20% while increasing coverage.
• Partnered with exchange leadership to expedite post-vendor breach recovery, enabling StoneX to resume trading first among leading finance firms.
• Improved coordination between legal and technical teams to support litigation issues.
• Created an operational review process to share metrics and KPIs between teams to enhance transparency and promote efficiency.
• Served as CISO during leadership transitions.
• Technical Expertise in Okta, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto (XSOAR, Panorama, PrismaAccess), Netskope, Intune, Active Directory, Group Policy, MSSQL, Grafana, Splunk, Elastic, Kubernetes, Containers, AI, CyberArk (PAM, EPM), Proofpoint (email security and DLP)


• Spencer Stuart and Associates - Security Architect
• 2015 - 2020 (Chicago, Global Executive Search)
• Spearheaded security operations and incident response team, guiding professional growth. Developed, implemented, and managed network and computer security solutions and projects. Collaborated with leadership to identify and prioritize areas of risk within the organization. Attended regular cross-functional management meetings to ensure alignment of the security department with organizational goals. Served as the CISO's representative for project initiatives. Produced regular metrics and KPIs for executive evaluation.
• Renegotiated Microsoft contract, leading to $1M in cost savings.
• Managed secure transition of key infrastructure to AWS, ensuring regulatory compliance and adherence to best practices.
• Restructured primary client-facing SaaS solutions into AWS cloud native aligned with the 'AWS Well Architected' standards.
• Developed and established business continuity, disaster recovery plans, and vendor risk management processes.
• Transformed team dynamics by recruiting and training a diverse global staff, enhancing efficiency and collaboration.
• Lead enterprise wide effort to modernize identity, migrated to new identity provider and successfully configured integration with Workday to automate user identity lifecycle (onboarding, role changes and offboarding)
• Orchestrated the implementation of full-stack security measures, such as Identity lifecycle, Identity governance, EDR, Data Loss Prevention, SIEM, SOAR, application allowlisting, threat-intel integrated DNS, patch, and vulnerability management.
• Implemented security gates throughout the Software Development Life Cycle ensuring the prevention of vulnerable code from being checked into repositories.
• Technical expertise in Idaptive, Okta, SecureAuth, F5 (APM, LTM, GTM, ASM, iRule), Active Directory, AAD, MSSQL, Splunk, Palo Alto (Panorama, GlobalProteect and firewalls)


• Spencer Stuart and Associates - Technical Manager, Security and Infrastructure
• 2013 - 2015 (Chicago - Global Executive Search)
• Led a team of engineers managing technical design and infrastructure maintenance. Oversaw security assessments on technical deployments. Guided and supported team members to enhance department capabilities.
• Successfully led incident response team, ensuring zero material escalations by implementing robust response protocols.
• Resolved ticket escalations from the operations team and coordinated with external vendors when necessary.
• Built fully automated method of managing fleet of over 120 Ubuntu proxy servers, including management of allowlists and patching
• Technical expertise in Active Directory, Group Policy, Bromium (HP Sureclick), F5 (APM, LTM, GTM, ASM, iRule), MSSQL, Palo Alto (Panorama, GlobalProtect, and firewalls), Ubuntu, Squid Proxy


• Spencer Stuart and Associates - Senior Network Engineer
• 1999 - 2013 (Chicago - Global Executive Search)
• First member of a newly formed Technical Architecture team in Chicago: responsible for recommending, architecting, and implementing all enterprise systems. Developed and supported Windows Active Directory and messaging architecture. Migrated datacenter infrastructure to 100% virtualized and fully automated delivery of Windows and Linux workloads. Worked with legal counsel and executive management to develop security policy documents and perform risk assessments.
• Created network segmentation around DMZ to publish new website. Tharted early attacks with default-deny firewall policy.


• Spencer Stuart and Associates - Helpdesk Manager
• 1995 - 1999 (London - Global Executive Search)
• Based in London, UK, I Recruited and managed the European helpdesk. Mentored career starters into effective analysts.
• Deployed the first internet connections at Spencer Stuart, DNS services and firewalls (Checkpoint Firewall-1 on Solaris)


• ISS - Co-Founder
• 1992 - 1995 (UK - Software Development and custom POS solutions)
• Based in Cranleigh, UK, I developed custom point of sale software,built hardware solutions and supported local business IT needs.