TripAction’s Aaron Cooper: Why Understanding Broader Company Culture Is Critical to a Security Operation Team’s Success

Aaron Cooper is the Security Operations Manager at TripActions with 20+ years of experience working in a variety of enterprise infrastructures. He specializes in managing and designing secure network environments to meet the needs of financial and corporate customers, managing security operations centers, designing and implementing highly secure and available data networks while maintaining HIPAA, SOX, and PCI compliance. 

In this episode, Thomas and Aaron discuss why understanding company culture is a critical component to successful security teams, how he helps his team manage burnout, and more! 

In this episode, Thomas and Aaron discuss why understanding company culture is a critical component to successful security teams, how he helps his team manage burnout, and more! 

 

Topics in this episode include: 

• His journey from hardware, to a vendor, to healthcare, to banking, to a cloud first tech company – how security posture and challenges differ across industries and companies 
• Why it’s critical to understand the culture of the company to run a successful security team 
• Why the state of security today is in flux and how security teams are changing how and what they respond to 
• Why the ‘onion model’ no longer exists so it’s critical to put on your ‘black hat’ 
• The tools and strategies that help Aaron with risk reduction and analyzing indicators 
• The one thing IT managers can do to maintain the uptime of their environment
• How Aaron works to prevent burnout among his team and what drives him to help his team succeed 
• How Aaron evaluates AI tools 
• How his major in psychology gives him insight into the minds of security analysts, how resilient they can be, and how to hold space for them 

Resources mentioned: 

• Year Up: https://www.yearup.org/job-training/cyber-security
• Hunter: https://www.hunters.ai/