Amanda Kollmorgan
Amanda Kollmorgan is a Security Architect Lead for Veolia North America with nearly 20 years across federal and state government service, most recently as Deputy IT Director for the WI Dept. of Military Affairs. That dual seat, building compliance programs auditors sign off on while running operations meant to survive an attacker, taught her the widest gaps in cyber rarely show up on paper. She brings the same level of passion for mentoring people as she does for the cybersecurity profession.
She/Her
Session
Coaching a junior analyst. Translating between the SOC and the C-suite. Holding a team together through an incident. These are cyber skills, even if they never show up on a certification track. Yet most conversations in the field still treat them as a finishing touch on top of the "real" technical work.
This talk reboots that thinking. It positions leadership, communication, mentorship, and emotional intelligence as load-bearing infrastructure; the layer that decides how teams make decisions under pressure, how incidents actually resolve, and whether the tools and frameworks we invest in ever get used the way they're meant to. When this layer is weak, technical excellence can't compensate. When it's strong, ordinary teams produce extraordinary outcomes.
The human side of cyber isn't soft. It's structural. This session treats it that way.