When I was in the eighth grade, I wrote an essay on my hopes and dreams which centered on being elected the first woman President of the United States. At the time, I was nervous that I would miss my opportunity, thinking that the “first woman” title would have already gone to a smart, trail-blazing lady by the time I could run; after all, I would have to wait 21 more years to meet the minimum age of 35 that the presidential office requires.
Although I haven’t yet been elected President of the United States, I’ve found that there are still many opportunities for women to hold a “first woman” title and, today, Juniper Networks is pleased to share that Samantha Madrid, Juniper’s VP of Security Business and Strategy, has earned that title.
Samantha is now the first woman elected to the Cyber Threat Alliance Board of Directors. The Cyber Threat Alliance is a non-profit organization built to improve overall cybersecurity by enabling real-time, high-quality cyber threat information among companies and organizations in the cybersecurity industry with the goal of protecting end users, disrupting malicious actors and elevating overall security. With this appointment, Samantha will help guide the direction of the Cyber Threat Alliance alongside its other board members.
Samantha has been a leader at Juniper for the past three years, overseeing the company’s security business and strategy. In this role, she defined and launched Juniper Connected Security, pivoting our business strategy toward converging networking and security services in the cloud.
Spearheading the development and delivery of award-winning products, Samantha revamped a once “Not Recommended” product line to now being included on every customer’s shortlist and seeing the product line receive the 2021 Customers’ Choice distinction for Enterprise Firewalls by Gartner. Through the introduction of new technologies that solve for priority market use cases, Samantha saw our Encrypted Traffic Insights for ATP Cloud win SecurityToday’s CyberSecure Product Award for AI/ML in Security. Additionally, she guided Juniper’s enterprise firewall product line to receive the highest security efficacy rating among leading competitors from CyberRatings.org.
Aside from these business successes, over fifty percent of the product managers on Samantha’s team are women and this is something she is especially proud of.
“The security industry is much more diverse than it was even 5 years ago,” Samantha said in a May 2021 interview with Authority Magazine. “More women and minorities are in highly technical roles and leadership positions, which means different perspectives and opinions are going into figuring out how to solve for cybersecurity’s toughest challenges. If we’ve learned anything over the past four decades of cyberattacks and breaches, it’s that we need to ‘think differently’ to find lasting solutions.”
And now, Samantha brings these values to the Cyber Threat Alliance. As a company and as a team, we are proud and inspired to see the Cyber Threat Alliance infused with Samantha’s creative problem solving and expertise as an elected member of its board.
