Aderant: Getting to know Jessica Mifflin, Aderant’s new Director of Information Security and Privacy
As she steps into her new role, Jessica delves into her background in cybersecurity and shares her plans to keep Aderant’s client information secure.
Q: What are your main responsibilities as the Director of Information Security and Privacy?
A: The environment at Aderant is fast-moving and client-driven. We’re experiencing amazing growth, and I’m excited to be able to directly contribute by providing leadership in such a critical area. As the Director of Information Security and Privacy, I’m now responsible for overseeing the protection of Aderant’s information assets and associated systems, applications, infrastructure, and processes. To begin, I plan to define and implement our overall strategy for information security, encompassing application security, vulnerability management, risk management, compliance assurance, policy development and enforcement, as well as employee security awareness.
Q: What are some experiences that have prepared you for your new position?
A: Prior to Aderant, I worked on a tight-knit IT team at ENGINE, where I was able to demonstrate the importance of information security for overall program success. While there, I led efforts to achieve the HiTrust certification (a security framework to protect personal health information) and most recently the SOC2, Type 2 certification, which Aderant is pursuing this year. As a third-party audit of a company’s security controls, the SOC2 provides customers with transparency and confidence that a company’s environment meets industry standards to protect client data.
As far as professional training, I’ve earned CISSP, CISA, and PMP certifications, which provide membership to the issuing organizations including ISC(2), ISACA, and PMI. Their periodic trainings offer insight into evolving risks and threats and provide guidance on response and mitigation efforts. Additionally, I receive the most up-to-date alerts on threats and zero-day vulnerabilities from sources such as US-CERT and the National Vulnerability database.
Q: Are there any particular challenges you anticipate facing in your new role? If so, how do you plan on overcoming them?
A: As cyber-attacks are being launched with increasing frequency, staying ahead of them and being able to react quickly is an ever-present challenge. Protecting Aderant and our clients from cyber-attacks requires a layered approach. To prepare our infrastructure for any future cyber threats, I’m focused on ensuring that we have the necessary technological controls to protect our network and applications, along with physical security controls and administrative controls, such as policies and awareness training. Additionally, our security solution partners will proactively inform me of threats and vulnerabilities.
Having the right tools in the hands of competent staff is the key to protecting our organization. With this goal in mind, I intend to work closely with leaders across a broad swath of Aderant departments, including IT, application development, cloud operations, and business systems to ensure that each team is poised to act quickly on any perceived threats.
Maintaining client trust is also a key objective, and the best way to do that is by being proactive and working closely with client CISOs and security staff as they evaluate Aderant prior to partnership and then throughout the partnership as they perform due diligence.
Q: Any final thoughts or personal anecdotes you’d like to share about life outside of the office?
A: In my free time, I enjoy sharing how exciting and expansive information security is to children who are navigating what they want to be when they grow up. I recently spoke about internet safety at my child’s elementary school and have also presented on careers in information security. As a minority Hispanic female, I am very proud of my accomplishments which demonstrate that if you work hard, set goals, and have passion and dedication, it’s possible to achieve great things.
