Speaker Biographies

DATA BREACHES: DEFENSE AND RESPONSE – SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES – March 18, 2026

Tim Connolly, Senior Systems Engineer, Illumio

Tim Connolly has been working with Fortune 500 customers to help them with their security needs for 30 years. Tim helps Illumio’s customers understand how to use Segmentation to protect critical workloads and reduce the impact of a breach by restricting East-West traffic. Before he joined Illumio, Mr. Connolly was a Sr Solutions Architect with Venafi protecting Machine Identities, a Sr Systems Engineer working on Data at Rest encryption products and services at Thales, and prior to that, a Principal Systems Engineer at Ixia (now Keysight Technologies), working with Network Equipment Manufacturers and Service Providers to test the security effectiveness and performance of security infrastructure solutions.

Fred Kwong, Vice President & CISO, DeVry University

Dr. Fred Kwong has been in the information technology field for the past 15 years in working in education, financial, and telecommunication sectors. Fred currently works at a Farmers Insurance where he currently is the Global Head of Privileged Access Control. Fred is currently building a new program seeking to govern, control, and profile privileged identities throughout the enterprise.

Fred’s work includes the creation of security and privacy policies, standards, and procedures. He is a subject matter expert in PCI, leading organizations to pass their report on compliance. With an extensive background in IT technologies, Fred continues to challenge the status quo by providing guidance in security and network architecture creating holistic designs that align to todays’ threat vector for organizations.

Fred has a passion of combining IT skills with organization development values. His broad range of IT skills has allowed him to view IT from many different paradigms and present them to the business partners in an easy to understand language. Fred servers as an adjunct professor at Benedictine and Roosevelt University teaching courses in international business, organization behavior, project management, and information systems. He holds a Ph.D. from Benedictine University and earned his master’s degree in business administration from Roosevelt University. Fred is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a Certified Information Systems Manager (CISM), and a PCI Professional (PCIP).