Bio.

Shakel Ahmed is a cybersecurity leader, mentor and conference speaker with more than 20 years in the industry, currently Director of Solutions Engineering EMEA at Pentera and founder of CyberDesserts.com.

Shakel Ahmed, known to most as Shak, is Director of Solutions Engineering EMEA at Pentera, where he leads a team of security engineers helping organisations measure and improve their security posture against real-world threats. He has spent more than 20 years in cybersecurity, including over a decade at Sophos, and is the founder of CyberDesserts.com, a skills and knowledge hub for cybersecurity practitioners and students. He lives in Oxfordshire, England.

Shakel Ahmed has spent more than 20 years on the front lines of cybersecurity, helping global organisations answer a critical question: how effective are our security measures against a real cyber attack? As Director of Solutions Engineering EMEA at Pentera, he leads a team of security engineers who work with leadership teams to evaluate the effectiveness of their security stack and turn the findings into actionable roadmaps.

Before Pentera he held senior sales engineering roles at ThreatConnect and Senseon, and spent over twelve years at Sophos in support, account management and presales roles across the UK and the Middle East. His career in technology began in 1998, and that mix of hands-on technical work and customer leadership shapes how he talks about security: practical, measurable and grounded in what attackers actually do.

Away from the day job, Shak is the founder of CyberDesserts.com, a skills and knowledge hub for cybersecurity practitioners and students, and writes the CyberDesserts blog at blog.cyberdesserts.com, read by more than 5,000 people each month. He mentors people entering and growing in the industry and speaks regularly at conferences and community events, including InfoSec Europe and the ISC2 London Chapter, with appearances on the Smashing Security podcast. He lives in Oxfordshire, England, where his spare time is split between the gym and the table tennis table.

Our next speaker has spent more than 20 years in cybersecurity. He is Director of Solutions Engineering EMEA at Pentera, founder of the skills hub CyberDesserts, and a mentor to many people in the security community. Please welcome Shak Ahmed.