Alvin Mills is a cybersecurity expert with over 28 years of experience in security infrastructure deployment and management, including project and people management. He has served in several roles within information technology and cybersecurity from network security engineer, manager, director, Vice President, and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He has demonstrated a capacity to implement innovative cybersecurity programs that drive awareness, decrease risk exposure and strengthen organizations. He is also experienced leading all stages of system development efforts including requirements definition, design, architecture, testing and support.

Alvin is the Vice President of Information Technology and Cybersecurity for Texas Bankers Association (TBA), a member-centric state organization based in Austin whose members represent the voice of the banking industry. TBA represents 95 percent of banking institutions of all asset and deposit sizes and is the oldest and largest state banking association.

He also founded the Texas Bankers Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (TB-ISAO). Alvin currently serves as an Advisory Board member with CyberFore Systems, who specializes in providing innovative security solutions to several industries with a strong background in the financial services industry.

Alvin began his career in cybersecurity way back in the early 90’s when security wasn’t even heard of or thought about. As one of the original secured access management (SAM) team members at MCI, his role was to provide innovative, secured access and support to the thousands of MCI systems for support teams. While at MCI he was also involved with the early effort to address email security and was instrumental in rolling out the first intrusion detection systems at the time, which included over 400 nodes around the globe. He also played a role in developing and programming a customized vulnerability management system that allowed MCI to scan their entire computing environment weekly (90K nodes) looking for vulnerabilities.

Prior to joining TBA, Alvin was CISO at Farm Credit Bank of Texas (FCBT) and built the first information security program for the organization. During his tenure at FCBT he also led the data privacy initiative, vendor risk management program and IT compliance program which supported not only FCBT, but 15 Association members located in 5 states. Alvin was also a member of the FCBT advisory committee.

Alvin has also held several cybersecurity leadership roles in higher education and health care education providers with university-wide responsibility and authority regarding matters of cybersecurity. In addition to leading and directing the university’s cybersecurity initiatives, he played a critical role in addressing the larger institutional issues of cybersecurity, policy, risk assessment and compliance that spanned the entire institution (campus and health system).

Alvin is a current instructor in both undergraduate and graduate level courses in cybersecurity through the University of Maryland Global Campus. In his 9 years in teaching, his courses serve cybersecurity leaders and managers and include evaluating emerging technologies, practical applications in cybersecurity management, foundations in cybersecurity, and most recently, the Capstone course in Information Assurance.

Alvin is frequently invited to speak at various conferences and banking community groups. He also sits on several regional cybersecurity working groups. He has held his Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) license since 2001. Alvin holds a BS degree in information systems from the University of Phoenix and a MSBA degree from Texas Tech University, Rawls College of Business.

Alvin is serving as Sector Leader for the Financial Sector at the ICS-ISAC to drive the vision and informations sharing requirements for the financial sector and enable cross-sector sharing.