Sean Connelly

Sean Connelly serves as the Sr. Director, Governance, Risk & Compliance at Zscaler. Prior to Zscaler, Sean served as the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Program Manager at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this role, he led the TIC Program Management Office, which is responsible for leading the Office of Management and Budget’s TIC initiative within CISA. The TIC initiative is the federal government’s strategy to securely protect government networks that connect to the Internet and cloud providers. CISA’s TIC Program Office works with a wide-spectrum of partners across government and industry and leads the way at enhancing network security across the federal enterprise horizon. 

Sean joined DHS in 2013 and served in a variety of roles, including the development of TIC 1, 2 and 3, along with the deployment of CISA’s sensor capabilities (operationally known as EINSTEIN 3A), and was part of the initial architectural team that stood-up the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program. Additionally, Sean was a lead author on the ‘IT Modernization Report to the President’ in 2017, as well as a co-author of NIST’s Special Publicization towards ‘Zero Trust Architectures’ in 2019. 

Prior to joining the federal civilian service, Sean worked as a consultant to the Department of State, where he led architectural initiatives within the department, including the adoption of TIC 1 and TIC 2, as well as the design of the State Department’s next-generation telecommunications platform, providing IT for a global workforce. Overall, Sean has over 15 years of experience in the federal domain, and over 20 years of experience in the IT and cybersecurity domain. 

Sean earned a MS in Information Technology Management from George Washington University, and holds two Cisco Certified Information Expert (CCIE) certifications. He holds the first CCIE in Routing, and a second CCIE in Security.