ABOUT

About the Author

Heather Case-Hall is a cybersecurity strategist, Army veteran, former CISO, speaker, mentor, builder, and self-described “cybersecurity therapist” with nearly three decades of experience helping organizations protect what matters most: their data, their people, and their ability to keep going when things get hard.

Her career did not begin in a polished corporate security program. It began in the practical, messy, high-stakes world of military communications and IT operations. Heather shipped to basic training just days after her eighteenth birthday, eventually serving on active duty and later in the Nevada Army National Guard. What started as a path to the GI Bill became the foundation for a lifelong career in technology, leadership, and security.

In the Army, Heather learned early that communications are only valuable when they are reliable, protected, and understood under pressure. She served across signal, communications, information assurance, and cyber defense roles, eventually retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 3 and leader of the Nevada Army National Guard Computer Network Defense Team. She worked across secure communications, incident response, forensics, vulnerability management, identity, SIEM, and cyber operations long before many of those areas became boardroom topics.

Heather’s transition into cybersecurity was anything but traditional. While serving in the military, she was sent to a CISSP course on only a few days’ notice. She passed, and that moment changed the direction of her career. She became one of the early Army-trained cybersecurity specialists and one of the first women in the National Guard to pass the required Army cyber certifications on her first attempt. That experience shaped how she still approaches security today: prepare quickly, learn deeply, adapt constantly, and never underestimate the person who was not supposed to be in the room.

Outside the military, Heather built her career from the ground up. She started in casino IT, printing checks, fixing systems, supporting executives, and learning how technology behaves when real people depend on it. She later held roles as a computer specialist, programmer, information assurance manager, database administrator, senior system administrator, SIEM programmer, director of operations, director of IT and security, information security program manager, CISO, demand and delivery leader, and senior cybersecurity solutions architect.

That range matters. Heather has not only advised security programs from the outside. She has lived inside them. She has owned the pager, managed the incident, handled the audit, built the team, trained the users, fought for the budget, explained risk to executives, and carried the weight of decisions that had real business consequences.

As a former CISO, Heather led security, compliance, awareness, and data protection work in an environment where uptime, trust, regulation, and human behavior all collided. She later advised Fortune 100 and enterprise clients through roles at organizations including a private wealth family, Koch, EMPLOYERS, Optiv, and Myriad360. Her work has spanned military, government, hospitality, gaming, insurance, consulting, and technology services environments.

Today, Heather serves as a Senior Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at Myriad360, where she works at the intersection of security strategy, client advisory, data protection, penetration testing, AI enablement, and practical risk reduction. She created Penetration Testing 360, a brokerage model designed to help organizations move beyond checkbox penetration testing and toward a more strategic, risk-informed offensive security capability. She also helped build the Data Security Health Assessment program, focused on helping organizations understand where sensitive data lives, who can access it, how it is exposed, and what should be fixed first.

Heather is known for translating complex cyber risk into language people can actually use. She has a gift for taking a messy security problem, untangling the technical, emotional, operational, and political pieces, and helping people make better decisions without making them feel small. That is where the “cybersecurity therapist” label comes from. Not because security is soft, but because the hardest moments in cybersecurity require trust, calm, honesty, and the ability to help people think clearly when everything feels urgent.

She is also a mentor and speaker who cares deeply about helping others find their place in cybersecurity, especially those who did not follow a traditional path. Heather speaks with the kind of honesty that makes people lean in. She talks about technical risk, career resilience, leadership, imposter syndrome, burnout, mentorship, and what it means to stay human in an industry that often rewards jargon more than judgment.

Heather is also the owner and creator of Gloria’s Pottery Barn, a creative business that reflects another side of who she is: an artist, maker, storyteller, and builder of things that feel personal and lasting. For Heather, creativity and cybersecurity are not opposites. Both require patience, curiosity, pattern recognition, problem-solving, and the willingness to shape something useful from uncertainty.

Most importantly, Heather is a mother of three: a son and identical twin daughters. Motherhood has shaped her leadership, resilience, humor, and sense of purpose as much as any title or certification ever could. It has taught her how to manage chaos, listen closely, advocate fiercely, and keep showing up even when the work is hard. Those lessons show up in the way she leads, mentors, writes, and helps organizations through difficult security decisions.

Heather holds a master’s degree in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance, a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, and a long list of industry certifications, including CISSP, GCFA, GCIA, GCIH, GPEN, GSEC, GCSA, CHFI, CNDA, ITIL 4, and others. Her background includes work across ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, CMMC, cloud security, incident response, governance, risk, compliance, identity, vulnerability management, disaster recovery, DLP, DSPM, and AI-era data security.

At her core, Heather is a builder. She builds programs, frameworks, teams, relationships, language, confidence, and community. She helps organizations see security not as a pile of tools, but as a living system of people, data, decisions, behavior, and trust.

And in a field that can sometimes feel cold, abstract, and unforgiving, Heather brings something rare: technical credibility, emotional intelligence, humor, courage, creativity, and a deep human voice.