Jean Schaffer

Jean Schaffer joined Corelight in March 2021 as the Federal CTO after advising Corelight as a consultant in 2020. With her decades of experience, she is responsible for ensuring Corelight understands the requirements of the federal space, including the defense and intelligence community sectors.

Upon her retirement in 2020 from government service, she created her own consulting firm, Verity Insight, LLC. As a consultant, she brings strategic and technical expertise, an understanding of the IC and DoD, and a wealth of experience to assist industry and the Government in delivering solutions. Jean recently retired as a C-Suite executive from the Intelligence community after 33+ years of public service. She has a proven track record for developing transformational digital solutions to large organizations’ most critical IT problems, automating, and institutionalizing those solutions.

Jean served as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). She advanced numerous IT security efforts across DIA’s global enterprise and underscored the need for a JWICS Modernization Program, gaining the support of Director of National Intelligence, Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence, and combatant commands. Building on this, she partnered with the other Intelligence community CISO’s in developing the IC Strategic Plan for Improving Cybersecurity (I-Plan). Dual-hatted as the Chief of Enterprise Operations and Cybersecurity, she was responsible for managing, operating, and executing funds for DIA’s enterprise IT services and the 24×7 IT and Computer Network Defense Operations Centers.

Jean was employed for 30 years at the National Security Agency (NSA). She held numerous Senior Executive Leadership roles in the cybersecurity and signals intelligence mission areas. She led several mitigation efforts for vastly improving NSA’s insider threat detection and deterrence following identified security leaks. She managed the global network infrastructure supporting NSA’s tactical, enterprise, business, and mission systems. She was the Authorizing Official for NSA, balancing the operational and economic costs of IT protective measures against the requirements for mission accomplishment. She was also the Director of the National Information Assurance Partnership/Common Criteria Evaluation Validation Schema earlier in her career.

Jean earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Louisiana State University in Computer Science (1986), a Master of Science degree from the Johns Hopkins Applied Research Laboratory in Computer Science (1991), and a Master of Science degree in Resourcing the National Strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University (2005).