Sean Connelly🦉

At Zscaler, I advise government and industry leaders on cybersecurity modernization, with a focus on Zero Trust adoption and secure cloud transformation. Building on my federal experience, I’ve engaged with national and international governments—as well as organizations across critical infrastructure, finance, healthcare, and technology sectors—to translate strategic guidance into operational outcomes.

Key areas of engagement:
* Partnering with global public and private sector leaders… Show more

At Zscaler, I advise government and industry leaders on cybersecurity modernization, with a focus on Zero Trust adoption and secure cloud transformation. Building on my federal experience, I’ve engaged with national and international governments—as well as organizations across critical infrastructure, finance, healthcare, and technology sectors—to translate strategic guidance into operational outcomes.

Key areas of engagement:
* Partnering with global public and private sector leaders to advance understanding and implementation of Zero Trust Architecture.
* Advising on U.S. government adoption of Zero Trust, including real-world applications of CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model and NIST’s SP 800-207.
* Supporting agencies and enterprises in aligning cybersecurity strategy with mission delivery and business objectives. Show less

At CISA, I led the establishment of the Zero Trust Program Office and served as its inaugural director—driving efforts to align federal agencies with Zero Trust principles and accelerate the adoption of modern cybersecurity architectures across government.

Key responsibilities and accomplishments:
* Zero Trust: Served as CISA’s senior Zero Trust SME and co-author of NIST SP 800-207: Zero Trust Architecture. Championed federal implementation guidance, policy alignment, and agency… Show more

At CISA, I led the establishment of the Zero Trust Program Office and served as its inaugural director—driving efforts to align federal agencies with Zero Trust principles and accelerate the adoption of modern cybersecurity architectures across government.

Key responsibilities and accomplishments:
* Zero Trust: Served as CISA’s senior Zero Trust SME and co-author of NIST SP 800-207: Zero Trust Architecture. Championed federal implementation guidance, policy alignment, and agency engagement.
* Trusted Internet Connections (TIC): Supported the TIC initiative for over 15 years, including five years as Program Manager for the TIC Program Management Office. Led work spanning OMB policy coordination, cybersecurity architecture reviews, agency engagement, governance, and compliance.
* Technology Modernization Fund (TMF): Board Member supporting funding decisions that modernized agency systems with a focus on cybersecurity and mission delivery. Awarded over $800M to 25+ agencies among ~50 awards.
* EINSTEIN/NCPS: As Security Architecture Section Chief, led the secure deployment of the E3A solution, including development of countermeasures to protect federal networks.
* Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM): Senior SME advancing government-wide visibility into asset management, vulnerability monitoring, and identity security. Show less

• Senior member of the State Department's Network Architecture team
• Designed and supported the State Department's various networks with focus toward cybersecurity.

• Responsible for the design, installation and support of the State Department's Perimeter Security architecture.

• Responsible for the architecture, design & configuration of the networking infrastructure at a new Data Center for NOAA.

• Operational Manager overseeing four Engineering groups.
• Office was responsible for the continual monitoring, management and maintenance of various networking devices.

• Lead implementation and support engineer
• Tasked with 24x7 national support of multiple customer’s WAN and LAN networks.