Mr. Blais is a multi-discipline certified IT professional, cleared to Secret with over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. His career spans numerous disciplines in IT including application development; design, build and operations of internetworking environments; design, construction/maintenance of information security architectures; governance, risk and compliance consulting; enterprise risk management; and strategic security leadership as a shared Chief Information Security Officer.
Mr. Blais has provided services to every level of government and held numerous positions in the private sector including Board of Director appointments for privately held corporations and a non-profit. In conjunction with his multiple certifications in networking, security and risk, Mr. Blais holds a master’s degree in Leadership and Organizational Change from Royal Roads University; is the author/creator of a Risk-based Information Security Model; graduated from Harvard’s Cyber Risk Management; and is currently working on a book manuscript on Information Security Leadership.
Some Career highlights for Mr. Blais include being a founding leader of TELUS Security Solutions; interaction with the US State Department for security presentation material; project work for the Royal Bank of Scotland; one of three people approached by the US Army at the Pentagon to provide a quote on Network Based Anomaly Detection services; Co-chair of a Provincial Higher Education working group participating in the development of a Cyber Security Framework for Alberta PSI’s; and, services as a virtual CISO through Alberta’s premier technology accelerator Cybera for multiple higher learning institutions.
He has spoken at multiple conferences, participated in numerous security industry panels, and has led multiple teams to Central America where they have undertaken humanitarian aid work. Mr. Blais was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, is married to his wife Laureen of over 30 years and has three grown sons Nathanial, Zachary and Timothy.