Continuous Monitoring Transforms Federal Cyber Risk Management

Austin Clark is the Enterprise Security Architect at the Department of Transportation (DOT), bringing 15 years of dedicated government civilian service to his role. He’s currently spearheading critical cybersecurity initiatives, including enterprise logging, phishing-resistant MFA, zero trust architecture, and SASE, fortifying the DOT’s digital defenses. Before his tenure at the DOT, Austin served as a Defensive Cyber Branch Chief for the Department of the Army. Beyond his civilian contributions, he is also a Chief Warrant Officer 4 in the Army Reserve’s cyber branch. Academically accomplished, Austin holds an MS in Information Security Engineering from SANS and a suite of industry certifications.

Mario Lunato is Field CISO at Knox Systems Inc., Knox enables software companies to achieve FedRAMP authorization in 90 days for 90 percent less than the traditional path. Knox runs the largest and longest-operating secure FedRAMP cloud, with 16 agency authorizations and customers including Adobe, Celonis, BigID, and OutSystems. In his role, Mario leads customer-facing architecture reviews, gap analyses, and FedRAMP advisory work that move ISVs into the boundary and onto the federal market.

Before Knox, Mario was a Principal Cloud Security Engineer and DevSecOps Technical Lead at Aquia Inc., where he led a continuous ATO program for a federal civilian agency that cut time-to-ATO by roughly 40 percent. He previously held cloud security roles at Quzara LLC and ByteChek Assurance.

A U.S. Air Force veteran, Mario holds AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS Security Specialty, CKA, and CompTIA Security+ certifications, and writes on FedRAMP and GRC engineering.

Akintunde Oluwafemi is a Subordinate Authorizing Official for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.