bio

Kendra DeStefano has a B.S. in Computer and Information Science. She spent most of her career in network engineering, working as a consultant and specializing in business continuity and disaster recovery. She then spent time as a capacity planner in Citigroup’s Architecture and Technology Engineering group before joining Facebook in 2013. After 3 years strategically planning global capacity of Edge POPs and offnet caches that served content to 2 billion people, Kendra joined Facebook’s security team as a Program Manager. She currently focuses on cloud infrastructure security.

Why did you get into cybersecurity?

I've always had an interest in security, especially after spending part of my early career in the Air Force. 20 years ago, protecting secret information was part of the job while serving my country. Now, information security matters to me because it's important to everyone. It's especially important now that most of the world is connected digitally.

What cybersecurity issue is monopolizing most of your time or are you most concerned about?

Even the most tech savvy person may not fully understand that securing information is a shared responsibility when operating in public clouds. Businesses are often featured in the news because sensitive information was hosted in public cloud environments and inadvertently exposed. It's my mission to keep company data safe. 

Kendra's Cybersecurity Tip

Don't forget the basics: everyone should have unique, complex passwords for every online account. Managing this should be simple and easy; there are some good password managers out there. Don't forget to enable multi-factor authentication to protect your accounts even better.