Kevin Swaney

Principal Cybersecurity Engineer

Kevin Swaney is a principal cybersecurity engineer with 17 years in information security. His work centers on securing the tools people actually use: AI assistants, identity and access, and the governance that keeps both safe.

Connect on LinkedIn
Kevin Swaney, Principal Cybersecurity Engineer

About

I have spent 17 years in information security, most of it in security engineering and architecture. These days my focus is the security of AI tools in the workplace: controlled intake, data guardrails, identity for human and non-human accounts, and baselines that let people get the benefit without the exposure.

This site collects short technical notes on AI security, access control, and the fundamentals that still stop most incidents. For anything beyond that, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.

Career highlights

Audited financial environments Banks and FinTech under intense regulatory scrutiny. Led NIST, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and CIS Benchmarks compliance and audit remediation, with reporting up to the CIO and CISO.
Adversary mindset Led penetration tests and red, blue, and purple team exercises. Ran high-severity incident response and forensics, and wrote the playbooks the team actually used.
Data protection DLP and data management programs, CASB with Netskope and Bitglass, and Microsoft Purview for data governance and compliance.
Tooling at scale Deployed CrowdStrike enterprise-wide. Palo Alto ACE-certified: firewalls, Panorama, GlobalProtect, and Cortex XSIAM, plus Carbon Black, Defender, and SentinelOne. Ran operations alongside several MSSPs.
Identity and vulnerability programs, rebuilt Overhauled IAM from the ground up: Azure AD, SSO, MFA, conditional access, and provisioning done right. Built vulnerability management from zero with Qualys, Nessus, and Rapid7, covering ASPM and CSPM.
DevSecOps and the human layer Hardened CI/CD pipelines and embedded security in infrastructure as code across Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Built security awareness programs from scratch with HR, turning the workforce into a human firewall.

Education and credentials

Information Systems Security Professional, University of Georgia (2021) · Troy University (2015) · Palo Alto Networks Certified Engineer · CompTIA Security+

Writing

Notes

Controlled intake beats shadow AI People will use the tools that help them work. The security job is to make the approved path clear, fast, and safer than the workaround.
Identity is the control plane for AI agents Every agent needs an owner, a scope, a lifetime, and logs. If it can act, it needs identity discipline.
Keep less data Data you no longer keep cannot be breached or pasted into the wrong tool. Retention is a security control.