Mark Valcich
District Director, Federal Law Enforcement, Diplomacy, Judicial and Legislative, Palo Alto Networks
As leader of Palo Alto Networks’ business serving federal law enforcement, diplomatic, judicial and legislative agencies, Mark Valcich’s most significant recent achievement is advancing post-quantum cryptography-capable network security.
Palo Alto Networks’ next-generation firewalls combine post-quantum cryptography, unified management and operations, AI-powered real-time security and a single sensor across multiple form factors. Together, these capabilities help national security agencies prepare for a quantum future in a harvest-now-and-decrypt-later threat environment.
The company also supports several priority cybersecurity missions under the current administration, including risk management and defense, AI security, zero trust architecture and protection of critical infrastructure.
“In the age of AI, where there are dozens of disparate cybersecurity vendor tools, government efficiency, speed and scale can only be accomplished with the integration of capabilities into an efficient streamlined cybersecurity user interface,” Valcich said.
Why Watch
Advancements in AI across both the public and private sectors are leading to significant mission improvements in the national security sector; however, they also pose significant risks. This requires securing the AI ecosystem from development to deployment, tackling modeling tampering, prompt injection, data exposure and agentic threats. Gartner has recognized Palo Alto Networks, Inc. as a leader in AI security and Valcich implores all CISOs and CIOs to include AI security in their strategic plan.
“My team is at the forefront of introducing the importance of AI Security to government agencies, educating the risks, and evaluating AI security risk mitigation capabilities,” Valcich said. “This is extremely important to me because AI has already provided improved mission insights and there is tremendous additional potential, but what will we do years and decades from now if we don’t act now to secure AI? It will be too late.”
Fun fact: In his spare time, Valcich enjoys traveling, bike riding and golfing. He also enjoys gardening and tending to his nine fig trees in his backyard.