Noah Abrahamson
Senior Director of Cloud Security,
Stanford University
From Repatriation to Resilience: Cloud Security by Default Across Diverse Higher Ed Environments
Thursday, April 30, 2026 | 8:00AM–8:45AM PT | California Ballroom A, Second Floor
Session Type:
Breakout Session
Delivery Format:
Industry Insights Session
As higher education institutions assess years of rapid cloud adoption, many are dealing with the challenge of identifying and securing unmanaged, unsanctioned, or shadow cloud accounts. It’s a balancing act between transparency, flexibility, and control, without implementing policies that slow research, instruction, or innovation. In this panel, security leaders from Stanford University and Texas A&M University, joined by Wiz, will share firsthand lessons from two very different journeys toward cloud security. Stanford brings the perspective of a mature, private research institution with long-standing cloud practices, while Texas A&M provides insight from a large public university beginning its cloud journey and working to establish consistent security controls across diverse campuses and teams. Panelists will discuss how they identify and repatriate unmanaged (shadow) cloud usage into centralized security programs; navigate the tradeoffs between building security capabilities in-house and implementing modern cloud security platforms; manage organizational change, staffing realities, and governance across decentralized environments; and shift internal culture to make security and privacy shared responsibilities, not afterthoughts. Attendees will leave with real-world insights and actionable guidance for designing cloud security programs that scale across institutional size, mission, and maturity while keeping security and privacy foundational, not optional.
